Converting Australian "unfranked" dividend payments to Quicken Windows for Canada

gjs

I am in the process of moving from Reckon Australia's "quicken" to Quicken for Windows - Canadian version.
In Australia, we have "franked" and "unfranked" dividend payments.
When the unfranked payments are converted to the Canadian version, they are converted as "Reprice" transactions and can not be edited. The message says the transaction needs to deleted and re-entered.
Another way is to change the transaction before doing the Australian -> Canadian conversion. I have over 1200 of these transactions, so would prefer not to have to individually convert each one. (btw, Find and Replace does NOT work for these transactions).
The unfranked category Reckon uses is "_DivIncUnFranked". It would be great if the Quicken for Canada version could convert that category to "_DivInc" when it is doing its upgrade/conversion of the Reckon files.

YingDave

@gjs
Hi there. We may have crossed paths in the Reckon Forums mid -last year. I'm afraid Reckon bastardised those fields in US database to cover Unfranked categories many years ago. There is a Facebook page in AU but I do not use Facebook. So in converting the AU file across to US/CA the investment categories revert back to their original name as internally that's what they were originally;

• Unfranked Dividends "DivUF" revert to "Reprice US" which unfortunately cannot be edited or changed
• Revinvested Unfranked Dividends "ReinvDvU" revert to "WithdrawX" with no account attached
• Unfranked Dividend transfer "DivUFX" revert to "ContribX"

@Quicken_Tyka is trying to help but it's not really something that Quicken is likely to change given the very few users who would utilise this.

In my case and the reason it took so much testing is that I manually change every investment transaction with these 3 in the Reckon product first before converting. I had around the same number. So in the AU File before conversion I changed each transaction by sorting the account register on category (or is called Action?) and updating each transaction via pop up dialog as;

• DivU edited back to just plain Dividends "Div" or you could use Miscellaneous Income and pick the category as one of the Un/franked dividend categories '_DivInc:_DivIncFranked' for example
• ReinvDvU back to "ReinvDiv"
• DivUFX is again edited to Miscellaneous Income transaction, then with pick the right category from the drop down such as '_DivIncUnFranked', depending on what you have in your category file. 

This should not change the income, IRR calculations etc if they are Misc Income or ReInvestment. I'm afraid there is no easy way to do this. So on some rainy afternoon I edited the AU file to change around the same number you have, then I converted the AU file over to Quicken CA.

Quicken_Tyka

Hello @gjs

Thank you for taking the time to visit the Community to report this issue, although I apologize that you have not received a response.

As far as I know, there are no additional settings available to currently improve this behavior that you are seeing.

What is the name of the financial institution that this account is associated with? I am curious if they may provide a QIF, or OFX/QFX to attempt to import this transaction to see if this has a better result.

If not, you may consider navigating to Help > Report a Problem to report this issue, although this report will not receive a direct response and will be used for investigative issues.

It's possible another member may stop by and share their personal experience on the issue.

-Quicken Tyka

Chris_QPW

If I understand this problem correctly here is what is going on.

If you enter a dividend transaction in Quicken (US/Canadian) behind the scenes it will mark the transaction with _DivInc.  There isn't any way to change this behavior short of using some other transaction type.

It seems that the Reckon version extended this idea to a special transaction type for "unfranked".

Now you open that data file in Quicken Canadian and it has no idea what this new transaction type is, and it calls gives it the reprice security type with all the ramifications of that.

Given that this is an unsupported action (opening/converting) from a non Canadian data file (even opening a US file from a Canadian file is unsupported, even though like what you are seeing "generally" works).

I think @Quicken_Tyka's suggestion is about the only possible attempt at a better conversion, as in export a QIF file and import that and see if it works better.  The one big advantage of trying this is that a QIF is a text file so if it doesn't have the right category or action type you might be able to edit the QIF file to get a better result.

YingDave

@gjs
Hi there. We may have crossed paths in the Reckon Forums mid -last year. I'm afraid Reckon bastardised those fields in US database to cover Unfranked categories many years ago. There is a Facebook page in AU but I do not use Facebook. So in converting the AU file across to US/CA the investment categories revert back to their original name as internally that's what they were originally;

• Unfranked Dividends "DivUF" revert to "Reprice US" which unfortunately cannot be edited or changed
• Revinvested Unfranked Dividends "ReinvDvU" revert to "WithdrawX" with no account attached
• Unfranked Dividend transfer "DivUFX" revert to "ContribX"

@Quicken_Tyka is trying to help but it's not really something that Quicken is likely to change given the very few users who would utilise this.

In my case and the reason it took so much testing is that I manually change every investment transaction with these 3 in the Reckon product first before converting. I had around the same number. So in the AU File before conversion I changed each transaction by sorting the account register on category (or is called Action?) and updating each transaction via pop up dialog as;

• DivU edited back to just plain Dividends "Div" or you could use Miscellaneous Income and pick the category as one of the Un/franked dividend categories '_DivInc:_DivIncFranked' for example
• ReinvDvU back to "ReinvDiv"
• DivUFX is again edited to Miscellaneous Income transaction, then with pick the right category from the drop down such as '_DivIncUnFranked', depending on what you have in your category file. 

This should not change the income, IRR calculations etc if they are Misc Income or ReInvestment. I'm afraid there is no easy way to do this. So on some rainy afternoon I edited the AU file to change around the same number you have, then I converted the AU file over to Quicken CA.

gjs

Thanks for the answers. I'll go with YingDave's, as that's sorta what I had expected anyway.

I have created a report [in Reckon Personal Plus] showing my UNFRANKED dividends. I am working through each transaction in the report and changing its category to a straight dividend. It's slow, but I'll get there. Started with 1,200 transactions, now down to just over 600.

My RPP subscription is up in April, so I have some time to get these done.