Accrued Interest: entered on form, but disappears in register

TomHughes

(Quicken for Mac version 7.9.1)

The "Buy bonds" data entry form has fields for the face value, price paid, commission and accrued interest. I entered the purchase of a Treasury Bill and included the accrued interest; the data form updated correctly, to show the total price (what the broker calls the "settlement amount"), but when I click "Save" and return to the register, the entry is shown only for the purchase price, not the total amount, which should be the price of the bonds plus the accrued interest, but is instead only the price of the bonds, without the accrued interest.

What is going on?

Jon

When I tried just now entering a bond purchase that included accrued interest, I wound up with 2 transactions - one for the bond purchase itself with the bond price + commission, and a second one for the accrued interest charge categorized as Accrued Interest. If I'm not mistaken you need to have any accrued interest charges you pay broken out as a separate number when completing Schedule B at tax time, so that makes sense to me.

If I double click on the bond purchase transaction to edit it the accrued interest field is still there but it's empty, so it seems like once the accrued interest transaction is placed in the register it's no longer directly connected to the purchase transaction anymore. The accrued interest transaction still has the bond name as part of the transaction so it shouldd be easy to find the associated purchase transaction unless you had multiple purchases of the same bond on the same day.

TomHughes

Thanks! After posting my comment yesterday, I thought I would try deleting the record of the security, deleting the transaction, and then re-creating the security in the Securities window, and only then entering the purchase of that security in the transactions register. This worked! I saw the purchase as an entry, and the "miscellaneous expense" as a separate subtraction entry, deducting the accrued interest. That was what did not happen when I first did it, possibly because I "created" the security in the "Buy Bonds" data entry form. Going forward I'll try to remember not to do that, and I'll be OK (though from a user experience perspective, this isn't ideal).

I agree that this treatment makes sense from a tax perspective. My cost basis in the bond does not include the accrued interest, so the register needs to separate the purchase into two transactions.