How can I enter a cost basis on a bond?

Mbellaus

I downloaded my portfolio data from Fidelity. All assets show a cost basis of "0" even though there is cost basis data in Fidelity. WHY? Is there a way to enter the cost basis of my stocks and bonds manually? Or is there a way to get it to download from Fidelity?

Boatnmaniac

I suspect you have your investment account set up for Simple Investing.  Simple Investing does not track Cost Basis nor transactions history....it tracks only positions and value.  If you have Simple Investing enabled you will not see a register for the investment account and will instead see a dashboard.

If you want to track Cost Basis you will need to disable Simple Investing and enable Complete Investing: 

• If you have multiple investment accounts and only want some of them to be Complete Investing:  Account List > Edit (for the accounts you want to change to Complete Investing) > General tab > select "Complete - Positions and Transactions" under Tracking Method > OK.
• If you want all investment accounts to be Complete Investing:  Edit > Preferences > Investments > uncheck the box for "Enable Simple Investing" > OK.

Note that most transactions and transaction details downloaded while Simple Investing was enabled will not be shown in the Complete Investing account register.  If your Cost Basis does not show up after making the change to Complete Investing you will need to manually enter or edit the purchase transactions so they show up as "Buy" and have the appropriate cost information added.

Does this answer your question or do you have any other questions related to this?

Mbellaus

I corrected the simple investing button but since Fidelity only downloads 90 days of transactions and my accounts go back years the older assets do not show up on the detailed register so there is no way to enter cost data, right? It would appear I would have to delete and then re-enter these all manually so I'm thinking my old excel spreadsheet will be my source for determining gains and losses - unless you have another idea.

Rocket J Squirrel

Edit the transactions which added shares to your account. Those will be Bought or Added transactions. Both transactions types allow you to specify the cost.

Boatnmaniac

Mbellaus said:

I corrected the simple investing button but since Fidelity only downloads 90 days of transactions and my accounts go back years the older assets do not show up on the detailed register so there is no way to enter cost data, right? It would appear I would have to delete and then re-enter these all manually so I'm thinking my old excel spreadsheet will be my source for determining gains and losses - unless you have another idea.

Yes, it is unfortunate that Fidelity no longer downloads data into Quicken for the last 2 yrs but it is what it is. 

Manually editing the Bought or Added transactions for the last 90 days (and also the Sold or Removed transactions) that are now shown in the register with the correct transaction information is, IMHO, the best thing you can do to get Quicken to show the correct gains, losses and cost basis.   Deleting those Add and Removed transaction and then manually entering new transactions would be another way to do that but would involve a little more effort.

For anything older than the last 90 days, if you want to show all the transactions data, you will need to manually enter it.

For both exercises you can use your old Excel spreadsheet data for doing this or you can log into your online Fidelity account and download the data from there.  On the Activities and Orders tab Fidelity allows us to download the last 2 yrs of transactions data in Excel format.  And on the Statements tab we can download up to 10 yrs of statements which will also show the transactions data in PDF and CSV formats.

Note:  There is a freeware data conversion program you can download and install called ImportQIF.  It was developed by a long-time Quicken user and still active participant in this Community.  This program can convert Excel data into a QIF file.  Quicken can import QIF files.  I know it used to be able to be used with investment accounts but I've heard that might no longer be possible.  But if you want to, you can try playing around with it to see if might help you in getting older transactions data into Quicken.  You can read up about it and download it from here:  http://www.quicknperlwiz.com/index.html.  (Perhaps @Chris_QPW would weigh in on this to confirm what I've told you or correct me.)