How Do I Add A Tag To A Brokerage Account?

saberman

I download transactions from my brokerage account.

I want to do an income/expense analysis by Tag. How do I add a tag to a brokerage account so the income/expense in the account shows up in the report?

Tom Young

Tags aren't an option in Investment Accounts.

What information do you want to append to investment transactions with Tags? There might be other approaches you could use. Have you looked at the Investing > Investment Income Report? You have other filtering options, like selecting what Securities to include, Security Types and Investment Goals that might work for you.

NotACPA

Also, where they're allowed, Tags are attached to Transactions … not accounts

saberman

Unfortunately, to be useful in financial reporting they need to be attached to all transaction in a brokerage account. That way you can run an income analysis for a tag (person) that includes brokerage p&l.

NotACPA

I don't quite understand your dilemma.

If you're running an income analysis for yourself, simply include your account and not others.

When running the report for another, include their acct and not yours.

Memorize these reports so you only have to set them up, with distinctive names, once.

Boatnmaniac

So you are planning to run P&L's for each person by tag?

And each person has their own brokerage account?

Then you should be able to pull your P&L report for each tag and in the customizaton also select only the brokerage account that is for that person. Since tags are not applicable to accounts, then the report you pull should show all the category transactions for that person's tag plus all of the transactions for that person's brokerage account.

Or am I misunderstanding what the issue is?

Tom Young

If the point is that you have an Investment Account in Quicken where some of the securities are "mine" and some are "theirs", create custom Security goals, one called "mine" and the other called "theirs." You can run the Investment Income report filtered by Security goals.

saberman

The brokerage accounts are separate but most of the other transactions are together in various accounts.

Now on the expense side I can put in a tag and get all of the expenses associated with one person. If I include the brokerage account nothing comes in because the transactions don't have a tag. I need the tag to extract the person's expenses.

I guess I could export the expense report to excel. Run the P&L for the brokerage account and paste that into the Quicken exported spreadsheet.

Boatnmaniac

If you are looking to capture the cash expenses of an investment account you might want to try doing the following (does not work with tax exempt/tax deferred retirement accounts): Account Register > upper right Gear icon > Edit Account Details > General tab > Show cash in a checking account = Yes > OK.

This will set up a new linked Checking Account in Quicken where all cash transactions for that investment account will be shown. This account does have a Tag field for transactions. The Category field will show transfers to/from the investment account. The actual category for the cash transactions will be shown in the Memo field.

I'm guessing you will still need to export the data to Excel but it should give you another option for how to get the data you are looking for.

saberman

Thanks, but shows all cash transactions since the account was opened which takes quite a while. The current year then has to be copied to excel. It is simpler to just run a P&L report on the brokerage account and copy the results to excel.

Edit: The cash transactions were removed from the brokerage account. When I then clicked:  Show cash in a checking account = No > OK the cash transactions were restored to the brokerage account, but the status (cleared/reconciled) was set to blank on all of them. I had to restore the QDF file from yesterday's backup.

Rocket J Squirrel

You absolutely can attach tags to investment transactions. But it's neither obvious nor easy how to do it.

If the transaction allows you to set a Category, you can also set a Tag by appending a slash and the tag name:
CategoryName/TagName

This is generally only possible with cash transactions. E.g., a dividend is automatically categorized as _DivInc, which leaves you nowhere to add the tag. You would have to change the transaction to a MiscInc, categorize it manually as _DivInc, and add the slash and the tag.

There is a bug in the dialogs which allow categorization. When you type in the slash and the tag, those both vanish. But they are still in the transaction.

Here is a real-life example from my file. I tag my tax payments with the tax year. Here, I had the IRS directly debit a brokerage account.

saberman

I could not find a Miscinc transaction in the drop-down list.

Besides, I already set a category/tag on cash withdrawals which doesn't affect P/L. It is the buy-sell of securities that is the problem. They generate gain/loss within the account, and they don't accept tags.

Rocket J Squirrel

I could not find a Miscinc transaction in the drop-down list.

You have to go down the Enter Transactions path to find it as "Income" and use the Miscellaneous amount.

It is the buy-sell of securities that is the problem. They generate gain/loss within the account, and they don't accept tags.

That is true.

q_lurker

It is the buy-sell of securities that is the problem. They generate gain/loss within the account, and they don't accept tags.

Thanks to JEP — A labor intensive (?) workaround:

The user can enter a MiscExp transaction to offset the capital gain amount; then enter a MiscInc transaction to reinstate the capital gain - and MiscInc transactions CAN be tagged.

Personally, I would reinstate the capital gains to a different category than the default _RlzdGain just to avoid confusing Quicken's programmer's expectations. Perhaps a process of expensing to a user created category GainLossAdjustment and then MiscInc Income as GainLossAdjustment/TagPerson1. The net in category GainLossAdjustment is $0. Quicken can still process _RlzdGain as normal with breaking out to LT and ST as applicable for Cap Gain reports. The user gets an income entry of the realized gain amount for TagPerson1.