Investment section modernization

fciani

I've used Quicken for a number of years. The investing section has seen a lot of good improvements over time, but it still has many shortcomings. Clearly, it was written as a separate module and attached to Quicken. The investing functional and behaviors are distinctly different that the core program. I think it's time to bring this section up to 21st century programming. The lessons learned could then be applied to rewriting the core Quicken code as many suggestions/issues are related to the original code base being some 20-25 years old.

When opening up the Category window, the Investing categories are all grouped into one section. All the other categories are grouped by and expense side and an income side.

Suggestion 1: Separate the Investing categories by income vs expense.

The second thing you notice is that these categories are fixed and non-editable. I can understand that there needs to be core hard coded categories to initiate the Quicken file, but the user has control over categories in the other parts of the program.

Suggestion 2: All the user to create new Investing categories/subcategories in the same consistent manner as in the personal and business categories.

Another issue (which would be resolved with Suggestion 2) is to allow for the customization of the Investing categories. For example, there are _intinc and _intinctaxfree which automatically flow to Schedule B. In a taxable account, this is true. However, in a 401K or IRA, the tax tax is deferred and should not be reported as income. In a Roth IRA, income is never taxed.

Suggestion 3: Allow for customization of Investing categories to track retirement account income and expenses properly. Perhaps an _intinctaxdeferred category and/or a tax deferred flag on investing categories. We should be able to track these categories so we know where we stand financially, but the reporting should be accurate.

I have an LLC which owns a brokerage account. Since the investing categories are all in the Personal Income or Personal Expense, Quicken doesn't track the income or expense on the business side.

Suggestion 4: Allow for Investing categories in the Business Income and Business expense groups.

As many have suggested previously, allow for complete tagging functionality on investment transactions. There are some work arounds to do this now, but they are not fully 100%.

Suggestion 5: Allow for complete tagging functionality on investment transactions.

Several of these items can be accomplished manually today, but updating the code and functionality with 21st century coding techniques can only provide benefits to the users.

Thanks for your consideration

Jim_Harman

Re: Suggestion 2:

Income is income, whether it is taxable or not. The Tax reports exclude income from securities that have been marked Tax Free and accounts that have been marked Tax Deferred, as they should. If you want other reports to exclude income from tax deferred and Roth accounts, you can go to the report customization and exclude those accounts.

I agree that Quicken should make a better distinction between tax deferred and tax exempt (Roth) accounts.