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BUG: investment account buy/sell with 0.00 commission shows up as Uncategorized

Brent

I am using an up to date Windows version of Quicken Home, Business & Rental Property.

If I do Reports --> Spending --> Itemized Categories, I see that SOME of my investment accounts generate entries under EXPENSES : Uncategorized.

Investigating, I found that the amounts claimed as Uncategorized are always 0.00.

The associated transactions turned out to be buy or sell transactions where the commission is 0.00.

So, Quicken has a BUG: it thinks that 0.00 commissions are Uncategorized.

Doing further experiments, I found that if I change the commission to something != 0.00, say 0.01, then that transaction as expected disappears from EXPENSES : Uncategorized.

It gets more bizarre: if you then change the commission from that fake value (e.g. 0.01) back to 0.00, then it now remains off of EXPENSES : Uncategorized.

OK, so this manual process of changing the commission to != 0 and then changing it back to 0 fixes the defect.

But it is a panful manual step to do that I should not have had to do in the first place.

Quicken support: I hope that you are reading this and can file a bug report ASAP.

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Comments

NotACPA

What happens if you leave the Commission field blank?

Brent

NotACPA: thanks for the suggestion. I should have mentioned in my original post that I had tried that.

What happens if you delete the "0.00" in the commission field to make it blank is that Quicken pops up an error dialog that says "Please enter a valid amount". So, you cannot exit the Edit transaction dialog without the commission field having some value.

So far, the only known hack is what I originally mentioned: edit the commission from 0.00 --> 0.01, save it, then go back and edit it from 0.01 --> 0.00. Bizarrely, this fools Quicken into thinking that the 0.00 commission is no longer Uncategorized...

Definitely a Quicken BUG for them to fix.

I just hope that Quicken engineers are reading this.

LMillsap1

I'm running R48.15 and have the same problem. I run an EOY Inc-Exp report against just the investment account and, under Expenses, an Uncategorized category shows with a value of $0.00. I then drill into the report and find the offending Buy transaction. To my surprise, there is a $24.00 Commission listed in the transaction. After tinkering around a bit, I deleted the transaction and the re-entered it from the statement (335.731 shares at $38.65 per share for $12,976.00 principal, plus a Transaction Fee for $24.00 for a total amount of $13,000.00). Ran the report again and found the same thing. If I uncheck Uncategorized, the entry disappears and leaves the totals unchanged. Since the commission is a part of the total amount, it would be helpful if there was some way of showing it on an itemized report.

Lauren

Jim_Harman

@LMillsap1

On the brokerage report, is the cost basis $12,976 or is it $13,000?

If it is a transaction fee and not a commission, the cost basis will be $12,976. You would enter the Buy without a commission and a separate MiscExp transaction for the fee. You can assign a Category to the fee and it will show up in your report. You can decide whether you want the fee to affect the reported performance of the security.

If it is really a commission, the amount should be included in your cost basis, making it $13,000 and will reduce any capital gains taxes you owe. You should enter the fee in the Commission box. Commissions do not get a Category but you can see them in the Investment Transaction report.

See this discussion

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7914682/accounting-for-brokerage-fees-vs-commissions

and this one

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20254634#Comment_20254634

and counsult your tax advisor.