How to correct Schwab LT Cap Gain Reinvestment entries, and others

Steerpike

Quicken Version 37.67 (Mondo mess resolved and downloads now occurring).

I'm trying to clean up a monster mess after downloading December's transactions for my Schwab IRA account. There are so many errors I don't know where to begin, but overall, the issues seem to relate to Cap Gain Reinvestments - mostly Long Term, but some Short Term also.

First of all, every txn that is labeled on my statement as 'LT Cap Gain Rein' by Schwab was downloaded into either TWO entries in Quicken - one for 'Bought' and one for 'Misc Inc', or just as a single 'Bought' entry. So I presume I can correct these by deleting the 'Misc Inc' entry, and converting the 'Bought' entry to a 'ReinvDiv' entry?

'Most' txn's labeled on my statement as 'Sttm Cap Gn Rein' by Schwab were downloaded into 'ReinvSh' entries, and that is good. But one such transaction was downloaded to an entry with action 'Bought'. I need to change this 'action' to 'ReinvSh', but I cannot get Quicken to allow me to enter an action of 'ReinvSh'! I see hundreds of 'ReinvSh' entries there in quicken, but it seems I'm not allowed to choose such an action?

A minor subtlety on the above; I noted in other recent postings here that users had entries with actions labeled as both 'ReinvSh' (for short term) and 'ReinvLg' (for long term). But I cannot make an entry in the 'action' field for 'ReinvLg'; only 'ReinvDiv' seems available to me. Thus, I can't make a distinction between the 'Div for reinvestment' entries (which get coded as 'ReinvDiv') and the 'LT Cap Gain Rein' entries.

BK

@Steerpike , yes, drag & drop.  You need to earn more badges (three stars rank) for additional editing functionalities to become available to you.  Here is the detail:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7849424/introducing-community-ranks

Tom Young

"So I presume I can correct these by deleting the 'Misc Inc' entry, and converting the 'Bought' entry to a 'ReinvDiv' entry? "

I don't see why you couldn't do that.  I'd probably delete both downloaded transactions and create my own ReinvDiv (or ReinvLg/ReinvSh as appropriate) just because I know that deep down Quicken can sometimes be "fragile" when it comes to investing transactions.

"I cannot get Quicken to allow me to enter an action of 'ReinvSh'!"

If you click the "Enter Transactions" button, isn't "Reinvest - Income Reinvested" available for selection?  That's available in all my IRAs.

"I noted in other recent postings here that users had entries with actions labeled as both 'ReinvSh' (for short term) and 'ReinvLg' (for long term). But I cannot make an entry in the 'action' field for 'ReinvLg'; only 'ReinvDiv' seems available to me.

Again, all those options are available to me in the Actions column of all my IRAs.  What version are you running?

BK

RE: "... But I cannot make an entry in the 'action' field for 'ReinvLg'; only 'ReinvDiv' seems available to me."

The way I manually create a short/long entry is by using the same "Reinvest - Income Reinvested" window and make my entry in the appropriate fields as in the image below.

Steerpike

Thanks to both BK and Tom Young for the input. I got my Cash and my Positions to match exactly ... after probably 8 hours of careful slogging through the details. Didn't help that December was probably the busiest month by far in terms of transactions! "why do I bother" - rhetorical question I ask myself almost every month these days!

Regarding the ReinvSh and ReinvLg actions - I was expecting to find an actual 'action' with that name in the 'action' drop down, but what you do is (as you both said), is choose the 'action' "Reinvest - Income Reinvested", and then enter data into either the 'short' or 'long' rows as appropriate. The Final 'action' displayed (ReinvSh or ReinvLg) is determined based on where you place the data. Interestingly, scrolling back through the history of txns in this account, there are no examples of ReinvLg or ReinvSh, just 'ReinvDiv'. So either Schwab never made the distinctions in their download, or Quicken never bothered to follow the distinction. Since I don't use Quicken for tax reporting, this has never been an issue but its interesting to see that this distinction is now showing up since the latest Schwab/Quicken 'event'.

On top of everything else, Schwab issued some corrections in January that essentially reversed out some of the dividend reinvestments from 12/31. In order to make everything balance exactly I had to use the 'remove shares' option

BK

RE: So either Schwab never made the distinctions in their download, or Quicken never bothered to follow the distinction.

From my experience it is the former than the latter, in the data that the FIs (financial institutions) create and supply.  In fact you can see what they send by looking into the log files or manually downloading the file from the FI and view it.

To make matters worse, there are inconsistencies as well: I posted here year or so ago that with two of my schwab accounts, one correctly sends the code for "Interest" and the other sends it as a "Deposit" which I manually modify to Interest every month - on going for years.  The data is displayed correctly on their website but incorrect in the download file.  So it is their inconsistency specific to creating the "download" data they supply to me, Quicken and others - in my particular case.

Like you I do not use Quicken for tax purposes either and instead use the supplied 1099s etc.

Tom Young

"Schwab issued some corrections in January that essentially reversed out some of the dividend reinvestments from 12/31. In order to make everything balance exactly I had to use the 'remove shares' option."

I don't know that's the correct way to fix things.  It sounds to me like the dollars stayed the same but number of shares were reduced?  Since these were "corrections" to December transactions I'd think the better way of going here would be to go back to those December transactions and change them to reflect the January corrections.

Steerpike

> @"Tom Young" said:
>I don't know that's the correct way to fix things.  It sounds to me like the dollars stayed the same but number of shares were reduced?  Since these were "corrections" to December transactions I'd think the better way of going here would be to go back to those December transactions and change them to reflect the January corrections.

Because the adjustments were made in 2022, and the originals were in 2021, I didn't want to do what you suggested because it would mess up the year-end values relative to the paper statements.

This is what one security transaction looked like (two entries): (I tried pasting an image; if that doesn't work, here's the text version)


01/03/2022 as of 12/31/2021 Pr Yr Div Adj ........(security name) ................................... -$68.72

01/03/2022 as of 12/31/2021 Reinvestment Adj (Security name) ........... 6.381 $10.77 $68.72

So there were quantities and dollars. Using the 'remove shares' option caused the cash and securities numbers to line up exactly.

Tom Young

"So there were quantities and dollars. Using the 'remove shares' option caused the cash and securities numbers to line up exactly."

The transactions were posted 1/3/22 "as of" 12/31/21 so I'd think an "as corrected" 12/31/21 statement would reflect the reduction in the dividend amount (the dollars) and the reduced number of shares.  If you got a 1099-DIV for this account, which you won't, the dividend amount would certainly reflect the $68.72 reduction from the original amount.  So I'd still think the correct course of action here would be to modify the original DIV/BUY or REINVDIV to line up with the 1/3/22 adjustments.

I can see the remove shares action getting the number of shares to line up correctly, but that doesn't adjust the dividend.

Steerpike

> @Tom Young said:
>...
>I can see the remove shares action getting the number of shares to line up correctly, but that doesn't adjust the dividend.

Tom - your logic makes sense. To be honest, I spent so many hours cleaning up the messed-up Schwab downloads that I may be missing a step in my description. I do have a entry with 'removed shares' and both the cash and securities balances do line up to the penny, but I may have taken other steps. I will let sleeping dogs lie until the end of Jan and re-visit then.

Steerpike

> @BK said:
> RE: "... But I cannot make an entry in the 'action' field for 'ReinvLg'; only 'ReinvDiv' seems available to me."
>
> The way I manually create a short/long entry is by using the same "Reinvest - Income Reinvested" window and make my entry in the appropriate fields as in the image below.

BK - how did you post your image 'in-line' with the text? I can't see any option to do that! It is most helpful to be able to post images.

Tom Young

@Steerpike

Drag and drop the picture into a white space in the Comment box.

BK

@Steerpike , yes, drag & drop.  You need to earn more badges (three stars rank) for additional editing functionalities to become available to you.  Here is the detail:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7849424/introducing-community-ranks