Tracking investment portfolio with Quicken

Robhawaii

This is a question about Quicken Deluxe for Mac subscription.  I'll be upgrading from Mint (but not importing old transactions into Quicken from Mint), but am also a previous Quicken and Quickbooks user. However, I have not used any Intuit product for investment tracking.

I'm recently retired and created a new asset allocation appropriate for my age and needs. I'm currently using the Morningstar Premium to track my portfolio which consists of about twelve exchange traded funds.  The portfolio is at three brokerages, which Morningstar does not support beyond all investments being grouped together in the same portfolio without an indicator of which brokerage they are held at.  I don't plan on connecting the brokerage accounts for web access via Quicken, and will manually enter or import transactions (if supported).  Funds are not currently set for automatic reinvestment, which I will do manually with quarterly rebalancing.   I will be connecting my bank and credit card accounts to quicken for category and budget tracking.

I understand that the current Mac version does not have the Morningstar star rating feature, which Quicken Windows does. However, it's easy to review this information directly on Morningstar.com

Will Quicken Deluxe make it easier to track the funds across multiple brokerages?  

The portfolio is being funded with a series of monthly purchases over a year, as well as quarterly rebalancing, so tracking the purchased lots and cost basis is important for when I rebalance.

jacobs

@Robhawaii  I have tracked my investments similar to yours for many years, and I find Quicken Mac meets my needs in this area.

In Quicken, you'll have a separate investing Account for each real-world brokerage account; in each account, you'll have the securities you hold. In the Investing Portfolio screen, you can easily switch between viewing your investments broken down by account and security to viewing just by security. You can switch between viewing the value of holdings, performance metrics, and realized gains, grouped in whichever way you want. And you can look at each account individually, grouped by type (retirement and non-retirement accounts, for instance), or all together. You can drill down to see this information at the  individual lot level when you need to.

You can enter your dividend reinvestments and your monthly purchases manually, or if the brokerages you use are supported in Quicken, you can set them up to download. Even if you don't set up to download transactions, Quicken will pull in price updates for each security so you don't have to enter that price information manually. 

I don't know if that answers all your questions, so write back if there are details of concern I haven't addressed. 

jacobs

@Robhawaii  I have tracked my investments similar to yours for many years, and I find Quicken Mac meets my needs in this area.

In Quicken, you'll have a separate investing Account for each real-world brokerage account; in each account, you'll have the securities you hold. In the Investing Portfolio screen, you can easily switch between viewing your investments broken down by account and security to viewing just by security. You can switch between viewing the value of holdings, performance metrics, and realized gains, grouped in whichever way you want. And you can look at each account individually, grouped by type (retirement and non-retirement accounts, for instance), or all together. You can drill down to see this information at the  individual lot level when you need to.

You can enter your dividend reinvestments and your monthly purchases manually, or if the brokerages you use are supported in Quicken, you can set them up to download. Even if you don't set up to download transactions, Quicken will pull in price updates for each security so you don't have to enter that price information manually. 

I don't know if that answers all your questions, so write back if there are details of concern I haven't addressed. 

Robhawaii

Thank you for this detailed response, it's very helpful! Looking forward to having financial tracking all in one program. The Quicken annual subscription model is good. No need to worry about installation files and making sure software is up to date. I like the option of keeping my data file local. However, I maintain a local Timemachine backup and use a cloud encrypted backup service. As well as an option to have Intuit maintain the data. Mint is also good, but has reporting limitations that I overcame by being able to export transactions as a CSV file and import into a spreadsheet. Would like to see more collaboration with Morningstar and Quicken for Mac. Morningstar analysis and information is unique in that Morningstar is not a brokerage, and I would pay a higher fee to have some of the Morningstar "X-Ray" tools available in Quicken.

jacobs

@Robhawaii  Just a few quick notes to clarify things you mentioned…

Quicken used to be owned by Intuit, but it has been independent company for the past 5 years. Quicken does still contract with Intuit for some connectivity services, but otherwise it has no connection with its former parent. 

You said: "No need to worry about installation files and making sure software is up to date." Well, not quite. The software still resides on your Mac; it is not just web-based software like Mint. That said, the process of installing Quicken Mac requires a few button clicks, and installing updates when a notification pops up of a new release it literally just two button clicks. (Also, on the Mac platform, every update simply installs the latest version of the software and puts the old version in the trash; there's no patching of old versions, or versions which can get out-of-date or corrupted.)

You said: "I maintain a local Timemachine backup and use a cloud encrypted backup service. As well as an option to have Intuit Quicken maintain the data." Time Machine backups: excellent, and highly recommended. Cloud backups, such as iDrive or Backblaze: also excellent and highly recommended as a second dimension of data safety. But the data you can, optionally, have in Quicken's "cloud" service is for syncing between their mobile app or web interface and your desktop data file, but it is not a complete backup of your data file. You cannot recover and create a new desktop data file from the Quicken Could data; you need one of the other back services for that.

There is some integration between Quicken Windows and Morningstar which has not yet made it into the Mac product. Hopefully it will sometime in the future. 

Robhawaii

I meant to say "No need to worry about installation files being misplaced and making sure software is up to date, since you will be alerted when an update is available."
Thank you for the update on Quicken vs Intuit.