Quicken E*Trade downloads track ESPP but does not track RSU

BlueTurtleJR

Seems odd that only ESPP transactions are downloaded electronically. I have resorted to manually tracking the RSUs. Posting this in the hopes that someone in the community is aware of a solution. Using Quicken Premier in Windows 10, Version: R40.21, Build: 27.1.40.21

Chris_QPW

Quicken doesn’t support RSUs.  As such I don’t really expect any financial institution to be able to download them.

In Quicken there are some “workarounds” that one might use for manually entering them.  I’m not sure if everyone even agrees on how they should be recorded though.

I had some RSUs shortly before I retired (which were started when they changed the tax laws for ESOs), and I personally didn’t consider them “real” until they actual vested, and so I could just enter them as a regular buy.

mshiggins

I'm surprised ESPP transactions are downloading. I didn't think there were ESPP actions in the OFX standard. 

Tom Young

"Seems odd that only ESPP transactions are downloaded electronically. I have resorted to manually tracking the RSUs."

I'm not exactly sure what that means, exactly, having never had an employer that offered either. 

Both Employee Stock Purchase Programs and Restricted Stock Units are, technically, "options", but mechanically they work very differently and ESPPs are "statutory" options (an income tax piece of jargon) while RSUs are "non-statutory" options.

However, Quicken does support Non-Qualified Stock Options (NQSOs), another sort of non-statutory option, and the work-around that does seem to work OK is to set the RSU grant up as a NQSO with an "exercise" date of whenever the RSU vests and an "exercise" price of $.000001 per share.  You "exercise" the option when the RSU vests and the extremely small exercise price should result in a zero-cash effect, unless you have an option for tens of thousands of shares.

I'm not sure if that really satisfies the "electronic" aspect of your question but it should provide a way of tracking RSUs and the resulting shares in Quicken.

BlueTurtleJR

ESPPs are not options. ESPP are purchased stock with my own money, albeit at a discount. Once purchased, ESPP download electronically into Quicken no problem. RSUs are like options, with a vest date. Once RSUs are vested, they add to your stock balance in Etrade, not into Quicken. The comment about RSUs not being handled by Quicken is helpful, although I have no interest in tracking non vested stock. Will study the workaround suggested. Thank you.

Tom Young

"ESPPs are not options. "

You might want to tell the IRS that they've got it wrong:

"RSUs are like options, with a vest date. Once RSUs are vested, they add to your stock balance in Etrade, not into Quicken."

I used to answer a lot of stock and security questions over at the TurboTax forum and I do seem to have a dim memory that Etrade not supporting downloads for RSU plans, and I think that's also been mentioned in here.

Why don't you call Etrade and ask them if you can get RSU vesting information into Quicken?  I'd expect that they'd push down an Add action (if they do support RSU vesting), which you'd have to delete if you're using the work-around and instead do the "exercise" action.

Chris_QPW

There are the IRS/laws and then there is "how they look" to the investor.
I have had all three at one time (none of which could I download).

For ESPP what happens is that you contribute from your paycheck to purchase company stock on a periodic basis and for a discount.
So, that looks like this:


But because of the discount, I'm also surprised like @mshiggins that this can be recorded correctly with downloaded transactions.

Here is the buy from above:


As you can see this isn't a simple "buy" transaction, and as @mshiggins pointed out, there isn't any OFX transaction for this kind of buy.  Quicken has a special action for buying ESPP shares, which walks the user through entering this information.  Why does this matter?  The taxing of ESPP shares is different because of the discount the employee is getting.  If this isn't properly recorded, any tax reporting on them in Quicken will be wrong.

With ESOs the employee doesn't contribute anything.  The employer grants options which vest on a given schedule, and the employee can exercise them when then have vested and are in the money.  So those look like:




Note because of the screwy new sorting these are backwards.  You exercise shares and then sell them usually on one operation.

Again, all of this being recorded correctly depends on using Quicken's special transaction actions/wizards.

No such wizards exist for RSUs.
For the one set of RSUs I got this is how I handled it:


It has been a long time since that happened, but my guess would be that I didn't even look to Quicken for how this was taxed.  Instead, just looked to my broker.  And BTW that broker was E*Trade.

Chris_QPW

BTW I will also state something about "manual entry" of all of these.  I never found manual entry to be much of a burden for these.  The reason is simple the transfer from the paycheck to the ESPP account is just in the normal paycheck reminder.  The buys were like every 6 months.  Hardly worth having the ability to download.

In the case of the ESOs the grants were even more infrequent, and not on any given schedule, and the wizards handle entering all the vests, which are put in the register at the time the grant is entered.

mshiggins

Chris_QPW said:

BTW I will also state something about "manual entry" of all of these.  I never found manual entry to be much of a burden for these.  The reason is simple the transfer from the paycheck to the ESPP account is just in the normal paycheck reminder.  The buys were like every 6 months.  Hardly worth having the ability to download.

In the case of the ESOs the grants were even more infrequent, and not on any given schedule, and the wizards handle entering all the vests, which are put in the register at the time the grant is entered.

Plus the ESPP wizard makes the entry of buys and sells really easy. And it handles the disqualifying and qualifying dispositions, ordinary income, cost basis, and gain/loss flawlessly. 

mshiggins

I had noted with my ESPPs at Fidelity, they were downloading the buy transaction as a regular buy after the ESPP shares were shown in the regular brokerage account, but if I did the ESPP Buy via the wizard before I downloaded, I could usually match the download transaction with the ESPP Buy. 

Maybe eTrade is doing something similar. 

Chris_QPW

mshiggins said:

I had noted with my ESPPs at Fidelity, they were downloading the buy transaction as a regular buy after the ESPP shares were shown in the regular brokerage account, but if I did the ESPP Buy via the wizard before I downloaded, I could usually match the download transaction with the ESPP Buy. 

Maybe eTrade is doing something similar. 

That makes sense.  Hardly seems like worth the effort though to me.