Is there a way to assign a catagory or tax code to an investment transaction?

leishirsute

When doing a Roth conversion of shares, I prefer to remove and add rather than transfer in order to eliminate to numerous lots in the target Roth account.  However, I would like to be able to assign a Roth conversion tax code to the Add action for that particular transaction.  Is there any way to do that?  Checking.

Rocket J Squirrel

The lots don't survive a Traditional-to-Roth conversion anyway. What you are really doing is selling the shares in the trad IRA, moving the cash, and buying the shares in the Roth all at the same price.

With a properly setup trad IRA, the cash transfer will appear as a taxable IRA distribution. You could manually assign categories to the Withdraw and Deposit cash transactions if you don't care about breaking the transfer in Quicken.

leishirsute

@Rocket J Squirrel I had considered those transactions. I did a sell in the traditional IRA with a cash transfer to the Roth.  The Roth shows a ContribX transfer transaction but the transaction does not show in the Tax Planner as Other Income.  Strange.

Rocket J Squirrel

Your trad IRA needs this tax attribute for transfers out. Then it will show in Tax Planner.

leishirsute

That suggestion didn't work. Could it be because during the sell I designated the Roth as the cash transfer account? That's what created the ContribX action for the Roth transaction.

Rocket J Squirrel

I forgot how finicky Quicken is about this.

What Q wants you to do is enter a DEPOSIT transaction in the destination (Roth) account with the category being the [trad IRA] as the transfer account. Doing it any other way doesn't work. Initiating the transfer from the source account doesn't work.

So get rid of your existing transactions and replace them with a Deposit in the Roth. That, plus the correct tax schedule in the trad IRA, should do the trick.

leishirsute

So sell the asset in the IRA and do a deposit in the Roth from the IRA account, which shows as a Withdrawal in the IRA account.  Then repurchase the asset in the Roth account. Got it.  Thank you.  It seems like a lot of steps to work for the Quicken program that should be working for us.

Rocket J Squirrel

You've got it. This quirky behavior requiring the Deposit transaction has been documented in a FAQ for years. I guess that's easier than fixing it to work more intuitively.