Recording investing expenses so they reduce the reported performance of investments

Sanfordrich

I’m trying to come up with a investment performance report for an investment newsletter I use. How can I include my expenses for the investment newsletter as part of the overall performance of the securities I am tracking? The expense is paid out of my checking account, and I am trying to design a way to include that expense as part of the overall performance of the securities I am tracking. I experimented with creating a dummy investment account with a dummy security I initially charged those expenses to before writing them off as an expense. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be reflected accurately in my performance report. Any suggestions?

Jim_Harman

Good question. I will edit your title so it describes the issue.

The first thing I would do would be to go to Tools > Category List and click on New Category to create an Expense Category to track the cost of the newsletter and any other expenses you might want to charge against your investing performance. This would also be a good Category to use for other expenses like advisor or account fees. Let's call it Investing Expenses.

At the bottom of the New Category dialog, check the "Affects investment performance" box. This tells Quicken not to include these expenses in the Returns column in the Investment Performance Report or the Avg Annual Return columns of the Portfolio views, thus reducing the computed performance.

Then in your investing account, click on Enter Transactions and select Miscellaneous Expense. Enter the cost of the subscription and pick your Investing Expenses Category. This will reduce the cash in the investing account, as if you paid for the newsletter from that account.

Enter the payment for the newsletter in your checking account, using the investing account in [square brackets] as the Category. This will send the cash to the investing account, restoring the cash balance there.

[update] The last step above does not work correctly, because the transfer from the checking account is recorded as an Investment. I think as @NotACPA says above, the only way to record this correctly and have it reduce your investing performance is to pay for the newsletter directly from the investing account.