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Tag investment transactions

race944t

I have seen prior discussions about tagging accounts, which I agree is not the purpose of a tag, but I need to tag investment transactions to be included in a tag report with other bank transaction tagged items.

I am working on a church account and we have gifts that have been given for a specific purpose and tags would work great for tracking the income and expense of the purpose (tag). If given shares of stock, I can not figure out how to tag that transaction and thus the amount of the gift (not worrying about the change of value of the security) in not included in any tag report.

Say for instance we are given a cash donation for building maintenance, I can tag that transaction. If we are given shares of stock I can not tag the value of that donation and thus my building and maintenance tag balance report is not accurate.

Does anyone have a work around?

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splasher

You can add a tag to a transaction that does not have a Tag field by adding the tag in the category field separated by a "/".

Example: category/tag

Auto/F-150

q_lurker

So if given stock, you keep that as stock shares in a brokerage account? That is not what I would expect of a small non-profit.

So first of all, I would never recommend Quicken as the proper tool for a non-profit's accounting and bookkeeping.

Second, I am not a big fan of using tags for earmarking part of cash accounts to specific funds. I am more biased toward use of Savings Goals. However, savings goals are not generally associated with investment accounts. Be aware, my position and bias is NOT due to much real-world experience with Quicken for those types of tasks.

Third, while it is possible to have securities uniquely assigned to separate 'funds' (Apple Inc - Maintenance; Apple Inc - Outreach; Apple Inc - Music), doing so requires significant manual entry and oversight. I would instead go for separate manual brokerage accounts as more clearly fund-associated and equal manual effort.

Jim_Harman

The brokerage accounts do not need to be manual, as long as there is a limited number of different "funds" that you are tracking and they have significant amounts of money in them.

I work with a small non-profit that has two Vanguard accounts - one we call the General account and one called Scholarship. Each has its own account number, securities, transactions, and balance

The accounts are reported separately on the Vanguard statement and are easy to download to Quicken. We do not use Quicken to manage the cash side of the organization, but when we give a scholarship for example, we transfer money from the scholarship account to the (non-Quicken) checking account. In Quicken this is recorded as a withdrawal with a Category of Scholarship.

q_lurker

@Jim_Harman point taken. I was assuming all investment funds were in one real-world account.

Rocket J Squirrel

If given shares of stock, I can not figure out how to tag that transaction

You can't. I presume you're using an Add Shares transaction and setting basis to the fair market value as of the donation date. The problem is that Add Shares does not allow categories or tags.

If you intend to keep the stock and not sell it immediately, you could fudge it with 2 transactions. A cash Deposit for the FMV, which can be categorized & tagged, followed by a Buy Shares to use up that cash.

race944t

Yes, sometimes we keep the stock as an investment and if we use the "value" of the stock given for a designated project, we would "release" the designation value associated with the stock. I did some playing around and if I use the "Memo" line and put the designated fund name, say "Building and Maintenance" in that line, then I can do a global search on that term and at least get all transactions, including investments, associated with "Building and Maintenance". That is sort of clunky, especially over a longer period of time, but most of our designated gifts are spent pretty quickly. I had thought about making a cash deposit and then using the purchase option to record the security. I think that would work even though the donor actually transferred the security "in kind". As to another comment, the shares of stock or mutual fund are in a real world account where I track each transaction. For purposes of designated gifts to the church, only the original amount is designated, thus a change in value does not change the designated amount. That means, the church could go in the hole on its designations in a down market, but we are lucky enough to be able to take that risk.

Jim_Harman

Another point on this topic is that I think the practice of most charities when they receive a gift of stock is to sell it right away and report the amount of the proceeds to the donor. That helps to resolve any issue of the value of the donation for the donor's tax purposes.

Disclaimer: I am not a tax advisor. You and any donors should consult your tax advisor for these issues.

race944t

The value to the donor is the value of the security at the time of donation regardless of what is ultimately done with the asset. We just decided to hang onto a good security, and track the initial value for the designated purpose.