Poor handling of Roth income and distributions. Particularly "Action" types.

atstephan3@

Roth Income and distributions are not properly supported. If I enter a dividend received in my Roth account, only “div” is available; if I wait for Quicken to update it via the broker, it is recorded as a “deposit.” But I can’t create a “deposit” Action on my own. This is important since Quicken treats dividends as taxable income. Quicken does not treat “deposit” as taxable income. A dividend received in a Roth account is not a deposit; it is tax-free income. Using “deposit” may have been an acceptable workaround when Roth was new, but Roth deserves to be handled appropriately. The best solution would be to create a “Roth-Div” action type. A less perfect solution would be to let users use “deposit” as the action type.

The same issue exists with “Withdraw” and “WithdrwX.” The best fix would be to create an action type, “RothWdrwX.” The second best would be to allow users to create “Withdraw” transactions.

These Roth action-type problems create normalization problems within the Roth. Currently, I can’t go back and change a “Withdrwx” to a “withdraw.”

Another persistent annoyance is Quicken's failure to match “WithdrwX” transactions with brokerage withdrawals that are sent from the brokerage account to another account within Quicken. For example, from IRA brokerage to a checking account. The “Download Transactions” listing shows the funds as a “Withdraw” without a destination account. So, I manually clear the “WithdrwX” and deleted the “Withdraw” item from the “Download Transactions” listing.

As a user of Quicken for more than 30 years, I have been more than pleased with Quickens. I currently use Quicken to record my personal accounts and those of a small 501 (C) (3). All my current income comes from my various brokerage accounts (taxable, IRA, and ROTH) and Social Security. In the past, I used Quicken to record salary income, rental income, and expenses from directly owned real estate, a small business that did many hundred transactions per year for 20 years. Not to mention the wide variety of expense types. However, I believe that Quicken can and should do a better job handling IRA and Roth transactions.

NotACPA

You can set the tax attribute for the entire account, just as a DIV in any other retirement account is non-taxable.

Div vs Deposit doesn't matter in a non-taxed account.

Chris_QPW

This is important since Quicken treats dividends as taxable income.

Just to clarify how Quicken handles this.

If you run any kind of tax report, the default will be to exclude any account that has the "tax deferred" selected.

So, the very fact that the account is not in the report means that Quicken will not show anything in it as "taxable".

In the tax planner you can't even select these accounts, in other tax reports you can override this and select these accounts, but you shouldn't.

In reports that aren't tax reports these accounts might be selected, and show the dividends as taxable, but those reports shouldn't be used to determine what is taxable.

Tom Young

"If I enter a dividend received in my Roth account, only “div” is available."

Well that's not a problem as it IS a dividend, a non-taxable dividend if you have the Account set up correctly, as mentioned above. But in my Quicken Roth Account I appear to have every other Action that I see in my after-tax brokerage Accounts so I'm puzzled by your statement of "only "'Div" is available. Is that literally true or were you only speaking about "logical actions I might use here", maybe because you were thinking a "dividend" would show up as taxable income?

"if I wait for Quicken to update it via the broker, it is recorded as a “deposit.” But I can’t create a “deposit” Action on my own.

What's the Financial Institution here? If the money coming into the Account really is a dividend then the downloaded transaction should report it with the Div action.

A "deposit" could be "outside money" (outside of all your Quicken Accounts) in which case you'd generally expect to Categorize it, probably as some sort of income, or it could be money coming from one of your other Quicken Accounts, that is, a "Transfer." How do these appear in the download deposit transactions? If they are coded as a Transfer with the receiving Account being named in the Category field surrounded by square brackets ( [ ]) and if for some reason your really want these to be coded as deposits, you certainly could create such an entry.