Investment Discrepancy [Edited]

Lee Cannon

In Reports: Investing: Investment Transactions
ReinvDiv transactions show a value in Cash column but not in Investment Column (Just like Div). I think that is WRONG. ReinvDiv is a reinvested Div so should have no Cash change, but should show the Investment increase. As a side note, I wish the Shares column had subtotals like the Cash columns.

I put in a "New Discussion" yesterday regarding a bug in Investment Transaction but can't find it.

Starksd

My shares column is a "shares balance" and does show updated totals after each transaction

Jim_Harman

I edited the title of your post to reflect the issue you are seeing. Your earlier post is nowhere to be found.

In the investment Transaction report, the Shares column shows the number of shares for the current transaction.

In the account's transaction list (register) the Share Bal column shows the running share balance for the security in that account and the price and shares for the transaction are in the Description column. When you select a transaction, the running balance is hidden and you can see the number of shares for the transaction in a separate field.

Lee Cannon

There were two issues in this post (I should have posted them separately):
1. A bug in the regard to Reports on Investment Transactions.
2. An enhancement of adding a subtotal of the shares transactions in a report.

In #1, the bug is that on a Reinvested Dividend (ReinvDiv) transaction: There should not be an entry in the Cash column (and there is): You received cash but but then spent it on the reinvestment. There should be an entry in the Amount Invested column (and there is not): You did make an added investment. So the subtotals for the Cash and the Amount Invested columns are also wrong when there is a ReinvDiv involved. Currently it displays just like it was simply a Dividend (Div) transaction which does add to cash and does not impact the investment amount.

In #2, I am asking for the total number of shares over all of the displayed transactions in the report to be subtotaled just like is done in the
cash and investment columns. This would be beneficial such as when you have an investment that is paying a reinvested dividend on a monthly basis and you want to know the total number of shares purchased over the specified period of time (typical for the past year or for the life of the investment).

Lee Cannon

A running balance on the shares would be great but I don't have such a column and there is not one available in the configuration options.
I have a Shares column but that is the shares for that specific transaction, not the current balance.
I am on a Quicken Deluxe subscription, so it should be current.
I am in Reports: Investing: Investment Transactions with a single security selected a single Account selected.

Jim_Harman

Right. I was just pointing out that you can see the running share balance by looking at the account transaction list (register).

Also you can sort the transaction list by security by clicking on the column heading. Maybe that would meet your needs.

Rocket J Squirrel

Lee Cannon said:

In #1, the bug is that on a Reinvested Dividend (ReinvDiv) transaction: There should not be an entry in the Cash column (and there is): You received cash but but then spent it on the reinvestment. There should be an entry in the Amount Invested column (and there is not): You did make an added investment. So the subtotals for the Cash and the Amount Invested columns are also wrong when there is a ReinvDiv involved.

That's not a bug, it's a feature.

It has always been the case, deliberately, that a Reinv transaction does not increase Amount Invested. (It does correctly increase Cost Basis.)

The idea is that Quicken wants to calculate your Returns based on the amount of money that actually came out of your wallet. You may or may not agree with Quicken's way of doing things, but this is what it does. If you don't like the results of ReinvDiv, you can replace it with Div+Buy, which will increase Amount Invested because of the Buy transaction. But this is not the Quicken Way.

Quicken help says:

Lee Cannon

I certainly hope that is not how the Returns are computed. I would think it would be based on the total Dividends + the Realized Gains/Losses + the Unrealized Gain/Loss, all versus the total of each daily Investment Basis times the days at that level over the time period of interest.

I just noticed a prior community discussion (19974368) that hits this same basic issue. It was reviewed by Superusers mshiggins and Jim_Harman. And their conclusion at that time seems to be that it IS a bug.

Does Quicken actually interface to the Community? If a Superuser has deemed something as a bug (or viable enhancement), is there means whereby it gets into the engineers at Quicken and to actually get confirmed and fixed, or is this a black hole?

I have a separate issue that I haven't found in the discussions yet. I have reinvested capital gains (ReinvLg and ReinvSh) from mutual funds that do not show up in the Tax: Capital Gains report. The accounts are NOT marked a tax free.

Jim_Harman

@Lee Cannon
On your last point, Accounts can't get marked Tax Free but individual securities can.

Accounts can be marked Tax deferred, in which case they will be excluded by default from the tax reports. Check the accounts that hold the securities in question to see if they are marked Tax deferred.

Re: requesting enhancements, you can create an Idea post in the Community where other users can discuss and vote on it. These are reviewed by the developers and those with a lot of votes sometimes get implemented.

When referring to other discussions, please copy and paste the URL. Others cannot find them using the numbers.

Jim_Harman

@Lee Cannon
re: Returns and other performance calculations:

The most complete definitions of the inputs to Quicken's performance calculations and descriptions of how they are supposed to work are in the in-product Help. Search for "key investment performance calculations"

The usage of some of the terms is counter-intuitive. 

Lee Cannon

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/19974368#Comment_19974368

re Capital Gains. These mutual fund Securities are not flagged Tax Free. Some Accounts are Single Mutual Fund Accounts (Selected as Yes) and some are regular Brokerage; the account are not Tax Deferred (option selected as No).

Jim_Harman

@Lee Cannon
Please start a separate discussion for your issues with the Capital Gains report.

q_lurker

His new discussion on the Capital gain distribution question.
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7890334/capital-gains-report-not-including-reinvestments#latest 

Lee Cannon

Done (posted new discussion)

BTW. I first ran further testing. And it looks like Quicken is assuming the mutual funds are Tax Deferred. On a sale, it picks up reinvestment from earlier years. Other than IRAs etc, cap gains are taxable in the year of issue.