One transaction for Reinvestment of Dividends

bmoore@

Quicken for Mac scrapes transaction from an investment account. There are three (3) transactions for a reinvestment of a security. See below.

Sometimes the dividend income and the amount paid for the shares don’t exactly match. See Apple dividend of 167.70 Added Shares amount of 167.71. It would be beneficial to have a single transaction for the for the reinvestment of dividends. Currently the user must change the Added Shares transaction to a Reinvest Dividends. Then delete the other two transactions, Dividend Income and Payment/Deposit. 

When I used Quicken for Windows, the triple transaction did not occur. Is there a way to fix Quicken for Mac?

Jon

You say this didn't occur in Quicken Windows; was this the same investment account? Which firm is it?

I've found that how reinvested dividends are reported varies from one firm to the next. Some use a single Reinvested Dividend transaction (Fidelity, for example) while other use separate Dividend Income and Buy transactions (such as Vanguard). I've never seen one use three transactions before, I agree that seems particularly suboptimal.

jacobs

I understand the Dividend Income and Add Shares transaction (which should be a Buy transaction), but I'm really curious about the third transaction, which is shown as Type=Payment/Deposit. Transactions of that type are income or expense transactions, and you show it here categorized as IRA Income. But since gains in retirement accounts are not taxable income, there's no reason to create income in Quicken for a reinvested dividend in a retirement account. Are you saying this is the way it actually downloads from the brokerage?

I don't think Quicken manufactures any additional transactions out of thin air; it's likely that this is what your brokerage is reporting. When you look on your brokerage website, does it show a dividend paid as cash and then a purchase of shares using up the cash? A better way to see what's happening is if you can download a .qfx file from your financial institution. Don't double-click it to import into Quicken; just open it in TextEdit and see if what's downloaded is two or three transactions, instead of a single Reinvest Dividend transaction.

I think the easiest thing to do is what you said: change the Add Shares transaction to a Reinvest Dividend transaction. This retains the number of shares and cost, so it's just open transaction, change type, save. Then delete the other two transactions. Yes, if you have a lot of securities, I'm sure this is annoying to have to do for each reinvested dividend!

Other than pursuing this with technical support for your brokerage to try to get them to improve what they report to Quicken, I'm not sure there's anything more you can do.

bmoore@

sorry for the delay. In Quicken for Windows, it is the same account, the site is Merrill Lynch

MangoMan

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20465296#Comment_20465296

I have the same issue for Merrill. It also used to be a single transaction for Etrade, but since MS acquired them it is now 2 transactions. It is a royal pain in the **** and likely you also want a single transaction to cut down on data file size/sorting through transactions in the register. It's really the fault of the brokerage service. They won't change it until enough customers complain. In the interim, I do the following to cut down the effort (may be a little different on a Mac):

1. In the download window be sure you can see the credit transaction amount ($) and the shares added transaction (# of shares).
2. Click on the credit transaction amount download so it appears in the register.
3. In the register click on the transaction Edit button.
4. Press Alt-V (changes the transaction to a Dividend Reinvestment) and then the Tab button 4 times to reach the quantity field.
5. In this field enter the quantity of shares being added (as shown below in the downloaded transactions window)
6. Press Enter and accept the Dividend Reinvestment transaction you just entered.
7. After confirming the amounts are correct you can now delete the 3 associated transactions (credit, quantity, debit) from Merrill in the downloaded transactions window.

The steps are a little more complicated if the dividend involves a security in which there are foreign taxes paid on the dividend (Canadian, Chinese stocks, etc.)