How do I show a stock sale as income

Question

I've sold stock and then did a withdraw moving some of the proceeds from my brokage to my personal checking. This works fine but how to I show this as a "income" category, so when I run my reports, I see how much income I have from stock sales over the year?

NotACPA · Accepted Answer

The sale is a combination of a return of your original purchase amount and a capital gain or loss ,,, but not an "INC" in Quicken's terms.  Have you included your brokerage account in the report?
And no transfer is ever income.  It doesn't increase your net worth, but only moves funds from one pocket (brokerage) to another (checking).

Tom Young · Accepted Answer

First, from a strict accounting standpoint the proceeds from a sale of stock isn't income.  It's simply the conversion of one asset (a stock) into a different asset (cash).  There is an "income" element is a sale, of course, (gain or loss) but the proceeds per se aren't income.A typical Spending report - assuming that the Account in which the sale is made is selected to "feed" information to the report - will show the gain or loss from the sale.  If you want to see amounts transferred out of the Investment Account included as a source of "income" then you need to select that Investment Account as a Category in the customization window and enable "Transfers" under the Advanced tab.  That will show up as "From [Brokerage Account Name]" in the income section of the Spending report.  (You probably will have to play around with this a bit to work exactly as you want it to.)Of course that "double counts" your income to a certain extent - you've got the gain/loss as an income line item as well as the proceeds, and of course this will sweep up all Transfers out of the Investment Account, irrespective of their source, e.g., dividends, interest, returns of capital, etc.If I wanted to know how much "spending money" I've used that originated only from security sales I'd probably instead run an Investment Transactions report with only Sold actions selected for the report, then compare the "Cash" total of that report to the amount transferred out of the Account to my checking Account.

q_lurker · Accepted Answer

To see the short term and long term capital gains and losses that might net out to taxable income from taxable accounts, use the Capital Gains Reports.