Interest income recorded as deposit, and two different categories

DericRock

Interest income from Schwab and Fidelity are recorded in their respective registers as action type "Deposit". Fidelity interest is recorded with category Int Inc (no underscore) and Schwab interest is recorded with category _IntInc (with underscore). Interest income from E*Trade and Raymond James are recorded with action type Inc - Income (Div, Int, etc.) and category _IntInc. The biggest problem is that when searching for interest I must remember that it is recorded with two different categories. This might not be clear to less experienced users. The built-in tax report for Schedule B knows about this and searches both categories. Is there any hope of having Quicken download the transactions consistently? (I contacted Schwab about recording as a Deposit and they claim they are coding the data correctly, but I haven't contacted any other bank.)

NotACPA

I have multiple Fidelity accounts … and they ALL come in as_IntInc. Have you looked to see if you've got memorized transaction(s) with the other categories that you're reporting.

UKR

Please verify that your "Int Inc" category (and/or any other similarly named categories) uses the same Tax Line Item settings as the built-in "_IntInc" category. That will help with any reports related to Tax Planning.

I would also suggest that you change category in all Deposit cash transactions to "_IntInc", to keep it simple.

If the transactions were downloaded as investment transactions, Type = Interest Income, they would automatically be categorized using the built-in "_IntInc".

Before I forget to mention it … review your Category List, please, and remove the "Hide" flag on all built-in categories (the ones beginning with _underscore) which are in use. This way you don't have to worry about asking to "include hidden categories" when creating reports, among other things.

Chris_QPW

Is there any hope of having Quicken download the transactions consistently?

In my opinion, the answer is no. From what I can see each financial institution chooses to encode their data differently, and as such there is little chance that Quicken would be able to make this "consistent".

Chris_QPW

Also, I would like to state that since these are investment accounts, the options for pushing these into categories that you want is extremely limited if not possible without manual entry. In a non-investment account, you have a lot more control over this.

The basic reason for this is in the case of the investment transactions is the "security action" that mostly picks categories with just a few exceptions like MiscInc. As such Quicken is hardcoded to use a given built-in category for a given "security action", and you can't change it.

On the other hand, in a non-investment account you can pick whatever category you like for a given payee name, but it is "discouraged" to pick the "hidden built-in" ones that the investment account uses like _IntInc and that is why you get the default ones of "Int Inc" for those accounts (You can create/change your memorized payee entry to use _IntInc, but you can't force Quicken to use "Int Inc" for the investment transactions).