How to Show "Amount Invested"? (Q Mac)

Steve29

Quicken Mac allows me to see "Cost Basis" but not "Amount Invested". Cost basis includes reinvested dividends. That's useful for tax purposes, but I'd like to know how much money I've put into an investment. Can I get there with a report? And does anybody know how would I set that report up?

Quicken Jared

Steve29 said:

Quicken Mac allows me to see "Cost Basis" but not "Amount Invested". Cost basis includes reinvested dividends. That's useful for tax purposes, but I'd like to know how much money I've put into an investment. Can I get there with a report? And does anybody know how would I set that report up?

Hello @Steve29,

Thank you for bringing our attention to the subject of investments and calculating their amounts for discussion here on the Quicken Community. 

I am wondering if you are possibly looking for the Invest Amt column available in the register in the Transactions view. To make this active, select your investment account from the Account List in the left-hand panel of the Quicken window. Next, navigate to Transactions just above the graph and security list, just to the right of Portfolio, then go to the Columns button denoted by the rectangle divided by two lines in the lower right-hand window. Then scroll down the list until you come to Invest Amt and check the box immediately to its left. 

I hope this is helpful, and I look forward to any reply you may be able to provide, should you have a chance to check back in with us here on the Quicken Community. 

Thank you,

Quicken Jared 

jacobs

@Quicken Jared How would enabling the "Invest Amt" column in the transaction register address the question? The question is how to see how much has been invested in a security or an account over its history. The register doesn't show a total of the "Invest Amt" column, so I'm not sure how this helps? Additional, "Invest Amt" includes Reinvested Dividends, ands @Steve29 was asking for a way to see how much he invested not including reinvestments.

I think the goal here would be to have something like an "Invest Amt (no reinvestments)" column in the Portfolio view, so you could look at your holdings and see how much you had invested in each account or security. There is, to my knowledge, no way to achieve that.

@Steve29 The only way I can think to get what you want is to open the transaction register and export to a spreadsheet. If you want a specific security, you can enter the security name in the Search field to constrain the register to just that security. Next, click on the Type column to sort the transactions by Type. If you've never sold any of this security, and the stock hasn't split, you can get the answer you want without exporting to a spreadsheet: select the first Buy transaction, scroll to the last But transaction and shift-click to select all the Buy transactions. The total of those transactions will appear under the Search box. If you have Sell transactions to factor in as well, you'll probably want to export the register and opening it in Excel or Numbers; then you can remove the rows for Reinvested Dividends and total what's left. 

Steve29

Jacobs -- many thanks for that, I didn't know you could total transactions that way. But of course, it's a lot of work to get a single number, and I'd want to do it separately for each security. 

I tried it just now and it seems that the ROI column is calculated based on ... Amount Invested. So the program has that value and uses it in calculations.

Needless to say, if Quicken has that number, how hard could it be for it to show it to me?

But again, thanks very much for your input folks -- super helpful.