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How do you recommend handling purchase of bitcoin? Investment or Account?

K-Bob

Recently purchased some bitcoin and wondering how to enter it into Quicken

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Accepted answers

NotACPA

The basic problem with holding virtual currencies within Q is that Q can only carry prices to 6 decimal places for an investment ... and many (most? all?) virtual currencies require 8 or more decimal places.

So, either route will have shortcomings because of this. Your best bet might be to carry the virtual currency in it's own investment account ... and just accept that Q's numbers will never be completely accurate for this holding.

All comments

NotACPA

splasher

One problem as an investment is that the precision of share qty (6 digits) isn't considered to be enough, so your #s will never be correct.

K-Bob

So you recommend setting up an Investment account just for crypto? rather than a spending account

splasher

K-Bob said:

So you recommend setting up an Investment account just for crypto? rather than a spending account

I did not say that, I said that the 6 digit precision of investment qtys is not enough for accurate numbers.

Chris_QPW

Even though the other answers are "more complete" as far as stating Quicken's shortcomings in this area I would like to answer the question directly.

Account vs investment.

Account implies using the cash balance. And in any account that is going to be limited to 2 digits after the decimal point.

Investments are limited to 6 digits after the decimal point.

Wise_Purchase

I use an investment account to track my bitcoin holdings, and I have a workaround for Quicken’s inability to deal with bitcoin’s 8-digit precision. Bitcoin can also be tracked in “satoshis” (1 BTC = 1e8 satoshi) or in “millibitcoin” (mBTC = 1/1000 BTC). (See “Mastering Bitcoin” by Andreas Antonopoulos for more detail on this.)

If you track millibitcoin (mBTC) in Quicken, you can track down to the satoshi with no truncation of bitcoin balances. I download my purchases in .csv format from Coinbase, do the adjustments on a spreadsheet (convert BTC to mBTC and $/BTC to $/mBTC), and enter them in an investment account dedicated to bitcoin purchases. (Tracking in satoshis doesn’t work in Quicken, as you have a problem with fractional dollar amounts being truncated.)

To track historical prices, I created a security called “millibitcoin” with the symbol “mBTC”. I download historical BTC prices from Yahoo finance in a .csv file, perform the BTC to mBTC conversions in a spreadsheet, and import them into Quicken manually.

See: How do I import data into Quicken for Windows?
• See: Import security prices from your brokerage firm's website using a .CSV file
• Format: ABC, 123.456, 12/31/02
• Historical BTC prices: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BTC-USD/history?p=BTC-USD

It takes some manual effort, but it can be done. I put in the effort because I wanted to use Quicken to track capital gains across different tranches. Hope this helps.

jmsimon68

Hi,

I am thinking about tracking BTC using millibitcoins, as suggested by @Wise_Purchase, but I can't find how to import security prices using a .CSV file.

Can anyone please help with this?

Thanks!!

EDITED: I just did… but I get an error "No valid prices found to import". This is the very first row of the CSV file:

mBTC,202887.3,01/31/15

Any ideas about what could be going wrong? Thanks!!