How to fix transfer ESPP from one account to another?

Question

hi all,

I got havoc upon transfer ESPP transactions from one account to another.

I asked related to ESPP questions already to learned the complexity to track ESPP. But, this is ultimate ESPP related issue for me.

As result of the transfer I got -95.6% gain, and huge negative gain, expected 0 changes to those gains.

The ESPP transaction date is very sensitive to the Date, but the Added just overwrites the original date to the transfer date. And that multiplied effect for any stock split that had happened between ESPP Buy and ESPP transfer dates.

As result of shares transfers from one account to another I expect exact the same all values in new destination account, especially Buy / Add date.

How to address this issue?

So far I think about manual checking for every ESPP transaction and fix all related values to match appropriate date broker statement. And also manually DELETE all ESPP transactions in the original account.

The stock "Remove" in the original account also distorted real holdings and all related values and resulting calculations for the ESPP.

Chris_QPW · Answer

There isn't any such operation for the ESPP just as there isn't for ESOs, and most likely for several other such use cases.

When they create the "Wizards" and hide information (somewhere in the database) they have to guess at what the "normal use cases" are and when you are doing something outside of that domain, all bets are off.  Sometimes another feature that already exists will work, but that isn't "planned" that is more due to the resourcefulness of the Quicken SuperUsers to come up with something that might work (sometimes only partially, and sometimes that might involve a lot of manual entries).

BTW I think another thing a lot of Quicken customers don't understand is that Quicken Inc doesn't staff a group of "investment experts".  By far, I think the Quicken customer base knows far more than they do and need the customer to tell them how such things should work.

And when you hit a new use case you are pretty much on your own.  In all the time I have been reading Quicken forums at the most I think I might have seen one other person needing to do something like this.

mikek753b · Answer

hello @Jim_Harman

thank you fir the reply.

No, there is nothing for the ESPP type, but single Date, which was set to the transfer date, instead of the original Buy date.

What you explained is what I expected, but Quicken for the Transfer Shares between accounts action, instead created as many Add ESPP new transactions in the target account, as many were Bought in the original account for all prev years, and set the Date to the same transfer date to all those new Add transactions. And created 1 Remove in the original.

Thank you for helping me.

Sorry for naive question - Have you tried to Transfer ESPP type Shares?

Jim_Harman · Answer

What you describe is what normally happens when you click on Enter transactions and select Shares transferred between accounts. You don't want to move the transactions, you should move the shares.

The Added transactions in the target account will be recorded on the transfer date and should show the original purchase date and cost basis for each lot that was transferred. If you click on Holdings in the target account and set the As of date to after the transfer, you can click on the little plus sign next to the security and you should see the original dates and cost basis.

If you track performance using the Investment Performance report, you should include both accounts.