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Tracking stock & transactions in Schwab Equity Award accounts?

ScottBla

Hi-

I've got Quicken Classic Premier for Windows (just updated to R59.6, but this applies to earlier versions and, I'd guess, the current version). When the account connection for the Schwab Equity Award Center (EAC) account has worked, it seems that it has trouble tracking stock vesting events. Quicken shows them as $0.00 Deposit type transactions:

Instead of some type of stock share addition or something that would show up as compensation/income. I have no idea what data Quicken gets from Schwab, but if I go to their website and download transactions to a CSV, it looks something like this (specifics edited):

Date	Action	Symbol	Description	Quantity	FeesAndCommissions	DisbursementElection	Amount	AwardDate	AwardId	VestDate	VestFairMarketValue	Type	Shares	SalePrice	SubscriptionDate	SubscriptionFairMarketValue	PurchaseDate	PurchasePrice	PurchaseFairMarketValue	DispositionType	GrantId	GrossProceeds
09/27/2024	Deposit	INTU	RS	1.234
								01/06/2021	C123456	09/25/2024	$123.45

So, basically, I've settled on manually creating "shares added" transactions for each vesting. Is there a better way to deal with this?

Thanks, Scott

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Quicken Kristina

Hello @ScottBla,

To assist with this issue, could you please provide more information about what kind of vesting events these are? For instance, are these RSUs, ESOGs, or something else?

I look forward to your response!

ScottBla

Hi, @Quicken Kristina ,

I get RSU grants as part of the annual compensation from my employer. They generally vest over 4 years with either monthly or quarterly vests. Since they are generally granted annually, that means I usually have 4 different grants active at a time. For example, last week I got some shares from 4 different grants. I don't have them modeled in Quicken as "RSU Grants" & "RSU Vest" transactions, since I'm fairly new to Quicken Classic. And, in downloading transactions initially, I manually backfilled some of the older transactions related to the currently active grants. Would it be appropriate to try to convert my manual entries to use those transactions types(or help in easily tracking them)? If so, is there an easy way to get there from where I am?

Thanks! Scott

Quicken Kristina

Thank you for your reply,

Since the help article recommends setting up a separate, manual, investment account to track RSUs, I don't think there really is an easy conversion for transactions you already have in your register. If you do decide to set up a separate RSU account, the simplest way to do it may be to have it start as of the date you create the account, rather than trying to backdate.

Whether creating that RSU account is necessary or not depends on how you use your Quicken. The current method you're using is adjusting shares on record (without changing the cash balance) every time the transaction from Schwab appears in Quicken as a $0 deposit. Does that method meet your needs? Does it allow you to track the RSU grants properly in reports? Are there any tax implications of RSUs vesting that wouldn't be adequately addressed by your current tracking method?

I hope this helps!

ScottBla

Hi-

I haven't thought about tracking tax implications, etc through Quicken yet. Mostly I'm interested in tracking accounts, expenses & categories, then eventually budgeting. I'm probably within a couple years of retirement, so I expect I'll need to pay closer attention to some things then (and RSUs won't matter any more ;)). I didn't even noticed that your "RSUs" text was actually a link (it's been a long week), so I'll take a look at that and come back if I have questions about that.

Having the setup I have now, I think it'll download the share balances (and create placeholders for me, I assume) along with tracking the actual cash transactions. For example, when I get dividends on the held shares or sell shares and transfer the proceeds to my brokerage, I think those show up when things are working right.

Mostly I was wondering a couple things:

If Quicken transaction processes could properly interpret those share additions that show up as $0 transactions (they have stock symbols & share counts in them along with the AwardDate, AwardId, VestDate, VestFairMarketValue fields), so there's probably enough data there to guess that those ought to be shares added to the holdings (along with cost basis, etc).
If not, are there any tricks I should be aware of for tracking them with a minimal amount of manual work ;).

Thanks! Scott

ScottBla

Questions…

Do I have to create a new account? Can I add "RSU Grant" transactions to my existing "Schwab EAC" account (currently a Brokerage type acct)?
If I have to create a new account, is it reasonable to create it, then connect it to my Schwab acct (after disconnecting the old EAC acct in Quicken)? (so, it can auto-download the transactions it knows how to handle)
Would a "RSUs" type of account behave like a Brokerage type account as far as tracking sales and cash transactions are concerned?
That help page on RSUs mentions "your business" a couple times, but I don't have a business. I assume I should pick "personal transactions" as the "Used for" reason.

Thanks!

ScottBla

I tried adding one of the grants that vest monthly for 4 years. The total number of shares doesn't divide evenly by 48, the actual vestings go back and forth between a couple numbers of whole shares per month (e.g. 19, 20, 20, 19, …). Also, some are sold to cover tax withholding, so the actual amount deposited is always some fractional number of shares. When I entered the grant and hit done, it didn't seem to take it and didn't show an error message, so I knocked a few digits off the end of the fractional part of the percentage per month (it should be 2.0833333333…%), but it took 2.083%. Then it proceed to create pairs of transactions for each monthly vesting for the life of the grant (in this case, from March 2024 to Feb 2028).

For the vests that have already happened, it entered both "Added" & "Removed" type transactions for each vesting event. What do those mean? The "Added" transaction for adding the new shares and the "Removed" for taking it away from the grant's unvested shares balance?

The "Share Bal" column seems totally wacky…sometimes it gets updated for the "Added" transaction or the "Removed" transaction or both/neither. I'm also now (didn't notice before) that those $0 "Deposit" transactions for the ones downloaded from Schwab are now showing values in that "Share Bal" that make no sense — and if I pick "Edit" on a couple of them then Save it and now it looks like all of the Share Bal numbers for those $0 Deposits went away. I guess something confused the rendering and it managed to get reset? Or maybe it took the RSU grant addition a while to update everything?

And thinking about it some more, I'm not sure it's worth it to set these up as RSU Grant/Vest transactions. Since I can't describe the vesting schedule precisely enough and account for things like tax withholding or cost basis, I'll have to manually update them anyway. The only advantage I can see is that it would pre-create transactions to remind me to fill them in (but getting the $0 Deposit transactions is basically a reminder to do that anyway. Am I missing anything there?

Thanks a lot for your help!

ScottBla

And, now that I created all those Added/Removed transactions for the RSU vestings…do you know how I would go about selecting more than one transaction in that Brokerage/Investment type account? I can't seem to get it to select more than one in the register and the Find popup doesn't even let me select one of them after a "Find All".

I can't seem to sort by the Description column (which would let me find the block of transactions since the descriptions all start with the same number of shares), but that doesn't matter if I can't do a multi-select.

And I assume I can't do some sort of "Undo" operation?

Sigh.

Quicken Kristina

Thank you for your replies,

There aren't a lot of operations in Quicken that give you an Undo option. If there is no option to Undo, you would need to restore a backup that predates what you need to undo.

Investment registers work differently from banking registers if you need to select multiple entries to move or edit/delete. (Note: It's a good idea to backup your Quicken file prior to moving or editing multiple transactions). To select multiple entries, go to the gear icon near the upper right of the register. The options to Move Transactions and to Edit Transactions will show up in the list.

Once you select the option you want, another window will pop up. You can sort and select the transactions you want to select in that window.

I don't have any RSUs myself, so I'm not able to test downloading them into my Quicken to see how they behave. I get the impression from the help article that, while RSUs are supported in Quicken Premier and higher tiers, they're intended to be tracked manually, and the program isn't able to properly recognize/handle the RSU transactions as they're downloading from Schwab.

When I tested setting up a manual RSU account in my Quicken, I noticed that once I completed the setup wizard, Quicken automatically generated all the anticipated RSU Vesting events. If you're planning to use a manual RSU account, then the easiest path, once you make sure everything is set up and reflecting properly, may be to either delete any new $0 deposit transactions when they download, or ignore them (assuming they're not throwing off any numbers or cluttering up reports).

I hope this helps!

ScottBla

Yeah…I found the "Find…" popup for the transactions matching what I want, but selecting them is completely broken.

I found the one you mention, but neither allowed me to easily select all or large blocks of the transactions. And the "Edit Multiple Transactions" popup doesn't show me enough to differentiate the transactions (the future ones are easy, but not the ones interspersed among my past transactions). I can do a search (with "Find…") for the number shares that was mentioned in the description for all of the RSU related transactions (e.g. I can search for "19.25701"), but that description doesn't seem to be there in "Edit Multiple Transactions".

I should've thought to a backup before playing with that…oh well…live & learn.

mshiggins

@ScottBla I wonder if there are still folks who did Quicken development at Intuit who might know the answers to your question on how equity stock compensation is intended to work in Quicken?

ScottBla

@mshiggins Yeah, maybe. But, it seems to me that if they can't get the numbers from the downloaded transactions, there will always be manual work. And, with the manual work, there are probably multiple ways to do it. The auto-generated stuff from the "RSU Grant" & "RSU Vest" will never be correct, so running across them in the register is a reminder to find the right numbers for them (and it would be nice if each of the generated transactions noted some sort of identifier for the RSU that it's a part of - something I didn't notice in my experimentation).

I also see the downloaded deposit transactions for $0, which is also (basically) a reminder to find the right numbers :). Either way, it's a comparable amount of work for me to track. I'm not sure if there are any noticeable differences (e.g. in reports, income/expense tracking, etc) between the RSU Grant/Vest transactions and my manually creating "Shares Added" transactions? Or did I miss something?

If there are APIs for updating the data programmatically, I could try to piece something together myself, but I'm unlikely to have the time & energy to do that kind of thing until after I retire (when I will no longer care about this particular problem 😉).

mshiggins

The OFX standards don’t have ESPP, RSU, or ISO transactions - or they did not exist the last time I checked - so unlikely to have those transactions downloaded. Maybe the new Express Web Connect+ protocol handles those transaction types?

ScottBla

Yeah…I'm not familiar with the standards in that space or what data Schwab makes available through whatever protocols they support…just that when I use the Schwab website's functionality to download transactions as a CSV (see my original post), it has enough info in it to figure this out, I think.

It is what it is…thanks for the feedback!