QCanada - Why does Quicken have Short, Medium, Long Term Capital Gains Categories?

justmakeitwork

Why does Quicken Canada have Short, Medium, Long Term Capital Gains Categories?

I am always confused as to which CapGain category I should be using in Quicken Canada. I understand the US has these categories but I didn't think Canada did.

Does anyone know? How do other categorize their cap gains in Canada?

Tom Young

The US had medium capital gains as tax law for a short while, but doesn't any more.  At this point the medium term Category could be eliminated as a choice I suppose, though you couldn't eliminate the Category entirely since, presumably, some users have transactions in the files that used this Category.

I have no idea if Canada ever had medium term capital gains.  Maybe that was just ported over from the US version?

justmakeitwork

I don't think Canada even distinguishes short vs long term capital gains. I think it is just capital gains. It would be nice to have a setting to just display a "capital gains" category in the Canada version without the 3 options that make things confusing.

Chris_QPW

The short answer is that Quicken is really a US product and Quicken Canadian is just very thin "face lift" of that product.  Lots of the "US nesss" comes through.  Like terms for the retirement accounts and such.

justmakeitwork

Thanks Chris. I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something.

Arctic Hare

Chris_QPW said:

The short answer is that Quicken is really a US product and Quicken Canadian is just very thin "face lift" of that product.  Lots of the "US nesss" comes through.  Like terms for the retirement accounts and such.

As @Chris_QPW indicated, there are many, many US centric concepts in Quicken Canada that don't map to how the financial industry, financial products, and tax laws actually work in Canada. Quicken Canada is simply Quicken US with some Canadian coloured lipstick. Quicken Canada is far from a whole and completely tailored product. This presents many challenges.... This is also true of Quicken's marketing, Quicken's customer support, and Quicken's online help, and Quicken's communications. All are US centric and most of the time do not correctly reflect application to the Canadian product or Canadian context. It has always been that way.

Quicken Canada is not even capable of computing mortgage interest the way mortgage interest is computed in Canada. That's how basic and fundamental the issues run.