GIC and Stated Interest Rate % - Quicken Deluxe Canada on Windows
When I create a GIC investment it gets me to enter an Investment Name, $ Amount and Maturity Date and not much else.
Why does it not ask for the Stated Interest Rate % so Quicken can calculate the earned interest once the Maturity Date (or mid term milestone) is/are reached ?
I would have thought Quicken could auto-enter the matured GIC including the earned interest based on the Stated Interest Rate % into the account. That should be the easiest thing Quicken could do for users of the product.
Maybe I'm missing something. Please advise. Thx
Answers
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Hello @DWPeg,
To clarify, is this a Guaranteed Investment Certificate that you're tracking? If so, based on what I'm seeing in the help articles, it doesn't look like it tracks the interest automatically, but it is possible to add that information in as a transaction.
I look forward to your reply!
Quicken Kristina
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Hi Kristina,
Yes, a GIC (Guranteed Investment Certificate in Canada and CD in The States) has 4 key attributes that I need to track. They are a Unique Name, $ Amount, Maturity Date and Stated Interest Rate % that the GIC will earn thru the term.
As a $ Amount and Interest Rate % are available, Quicken must be able to track both and enter in the calculated earned interest once the Maturity Date is reached.
This basic functionality must be available within Quicken, isn't it?
Let me know. Thx
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I do not believe that functionality is presently available in Quicken. The matter is not complex, but is a bit more involved than what has been suggested because there are different ways to quote the interest rate and GIC interest can be simple or compounding.
In my experience, the final value of a GIC is noted when I purchase one and that value could be recorded in Quicken. I use the security name to record the detailed information about each GIC; i.e. I create a unique security for each GIC purchased.
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The only interest Quicken will calculate is interest on a loan (including a loan that you might give to someone else).
Quicken hasn't really got a lot to "predict the future" especially not in the Canadian version.
Quicken expects that you will be downloading or manually entering the interest as it comes in.
In fact, I think the main reason that Quicken even has a "loan wizard" is because there is a split between the principal payment and the interest. For a something like a CD there is just one amount to enter or download.
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and the last thing we need is a GIC interest calculator that is as problematic as Quicken's loan calculator - I've never been able to get the loan interest calculation in Quicken to correctly calculate the interest on any of my mortgages…
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@Arctic Hare most likely the reason why you cannot get the loan interest to calculated correctly on your loans is that Canadian loans have a different loan interest calculation method than US loans. Either the programing necessary is missing or lacking or never considered.
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I think @QuickUserPSP is probably right on this, but at the same time like @Arctic Hare I don't see the need for a CD/GIC interest calculator.
Stated a different way, I see people come into the Quicken forum all the time and state "How can Quicken not have this fundamental feature!" You know that one that no one else has asked for in at the 40 years that Quicken has been around, and that the one that submitted as an idea so that it can be voted on only a few people ever vote on it.
To me if people haven't asked for it in all this time, it clearly isn't a "fundamental feature". It can certainly be a "nice to have" feature, and it can also be a can of worms feature.
Any interest rate calculator seems to fall into that category. When I was using, I found that the loan wizard was very accurate for my loans (US 30-year mortgage), never being off by more than one cent. But that is just one kind of loan.
One of the "can of worms" feature requests is in fact downloading of loans. Most people envisioned that what Intuit would do is keep using the loan wizard which creates a special reminder that goes into the checking account and splits off the principal and interest. Interest recorded as an expense and the principal a transfer to the loan account, and the download would match that. But that isn't what Intuit did.
See Intuit wanted to solve that problem and another they had. People were always complaining that their loan type wasn't covered by the loan wizard. And that isn't surprising. Daily interest loans can't be done because they are based on the day payment clears which Quicken will never know accurately. There were other strange loans that loan companies came up with too. So, what Intuit did is just decide to get the financial institution to send the information for the loans and not use the loan wizard to figure out the interest at all.
The result in Quicken Windows is that if you setup a loan account for downloading Quicken will hide the register, because since the financial institution is controlling the information, they don't want the user mucking with it. And then we get reports that for some strange reason the loan account is marked paid off when it isn't. And other such kinds of problems.
So, you basically get a can of worms for what was in fact "clearing of one transaction" a month. What's more, in fact if the checking account was properly reconciled then the only way the loan account could be wrong was if the mix between the interest and payment was wrong. But that is easy to check and what's more you see it pop up in the reports, like the tax reports on interest paid for loans, which at least in the US can be deducted from our taxes.
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You are correct. That is the reason. I didn't get into explaining the why in the interest of brevity (pun not intended, but it is kinda funny)… but, shouldn't the Canadian version of Quicken calculate loan interest the way Canadian financial institutions do? This is one of the many things that aren't so Canadian in the Canadian version of Quicken.
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shouldn't the Canadian version of Quicken calculate loan interest the way Canadian financial institutions do? This is one of the many things that aren't so Canadian in the Canadian version of Quicken.
I believe Quicken Mac "Canada" (which is just one setting that can be changed in the US version if people want) is even worse.
The way I understand the history of Quicken Windows Canadian is that it started out as an install option (you picked US or Canada). As time went on, they eventually spit out the code to a separate branch, and for some period of time, a Canadian developer group worked on it (and that is probably why it has better multiple currency support), but that was always "lined up" with the US branch, meaning that in a lot of cases it was just lipstick over the US version. But eventually Intuit killed the Canadian development group and brought it back to the "US" group doing it. I quoted US, because in reality from what I have seen in the pictures of the Windows group and such, long ago Intuit and not Quicken Inc had farmed out the development to India. So, not only are they Canadian developers, but they also aren't even US developers. And that also implies that they can't even use the product they are developing for their own use, at least not any of the online features.
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