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Simplifying Investment Tracking

willi1

How do I enter a transaction in an investment account that will allow me to adjust the outstanding balance based on my Brokerage Monthly Statements. I want to do away with all the individual tracking as I constantly run into issues with Currencies, and all my info for tax purposes is filed by the brokerage with Revenue Canada, and accountant can deal with ACB issues. It seems like an exercise in futility as the Broker's Statement is reliable. I notice in other type of accounts you can adjust the balance with a specific transaction but I don't see a similar choice for investment accounts.

Thanks for any guidance you are able to provide.

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Chris_QPW

I'm not sure if the Canadian version supports Simple investing mode, but if it does, and you can download transactions from your account, that would probably be the simplest way to do what you want.

If not and you want to track the securities, you can select the gear icon in the account and select Update Share Balance and do this for each security and Update Cash Balance for the cash.

If all you want is to track it as cash, you can just first update the security balances to zero and then the cash balance to the total value of the account.

Chris_QPW

Note also the above could be done with Add Shares/Remove Shares of the securities, but using Update Share Balance does the calculations for you. In the case of the cash balance that is entered as a Misc transaction for either a positive or negative amount.

Jim_Harman

You can also use Simple mode for offline accounts. Click on the gear at the top right of the account window then Update Cash balance and, for each of your securities, Update share balance. If you securities are publicly traded you can click on Update quotes to get current prices. Unfortunately the Neo exchange is not supported for price downloads.

willi1

Thank you for your inputs. I don't believe you can even download transactions with Quicken Canada, let alone the Simple Mode mentioned. It seems the least trouble would be that suggested by Chris:

If all you want is to track it as cash, you can just first update the security balances to zero and then the cash balance to the total value of the account.

willi1

As I started to proceed with this, I noticed this:

Can anyone help me to understand what the pros/cons are of using the 'AdjShBal' investment action. I'm not familiar with placeholder transactions. Thank you.

willi1

Also, Chris, if you have a moment…if I followed the 'cash' approach as you outlined, it would seem the only thing I would need to enter for my personal budget numbers is the income. The Fees and any Taxes withheld would also just be part of the accounting for tax purposes at year end and forwarded directly to RevCda….yes?

Hope you see this…Thanks!

Chris_QPW

This all comes down to how much you want. Let’s imagine that a person doesn’t care about the securities at all. All they wanna know is the current value and may be the fees. Given that one could just use say a checking account and set the intent to investing or retirement and just enter cash transactions that would increase or decrease the value of the account. And throw in some transactions that capture the fees.

Next level up is a person wants keep track of the securities, but they’re not concerned about capital gains and such. They just want at some interval to know how many shares they have of a particular security and how much cash is in the account. That is what investing mode is all about. Whether it’s done automatically or manually it basically is using add or remove shares kind of transactions to record when you have more or less shares of a particular security. And then the same kind of thing with the except it’s a miscellaneous expense or income. I will note that in the normal automatic, simple investing mode it fees. If you’re doing it manually, it’s just a matter of adding a miscellaneous expense transaction.

The disadvantage of you can’t track capital gains because doesn’t know how much you paid for those shares or how much you sold them for it just knows that you added or subtracted shares.

placeholder in quicken are very close to just share transactions. The main difference is that even though I over it when you’re shares you can enter how much you paid for them and sold them for so you can actually do calculations. But with placeholders they are they never have how much it cost or sold for. Normally are also put in pretty much automatically by quicken. If downloading transactions from the financial and the financial institution says that you have a different amount of shares than what you have recorded in, might give you a option to put in a which does the same and remove shares, it just does the adjustment so that quickens accounting matches the financial institutions as far as how many shares you have.

the big reason why people worn about placeholders is if you want to record capital gains properly with the transactions and all they get in the way of doing it and have to be removed before you can properly enter all the regular transactions for buys and sells and that’s such

Arctic Hare

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20469979#Comment_20469979

A very small number of Canadian financial institutions support downloading any investment transaction data. Neither of my Canadian discount brokers support downloading transaction data to Quicken, but there are a few that do provide some support for investment transaction download. While I have never tried downloading investment transactions into Quicken Canada, I can only surmise that it wouldn't be a great experience.

willi1

Chris…thank you ‘so’ much for taking the time to help me…I think I’ve got my head on straight now

Arctic Hare…(love that handle😉)…

“I can only surmise that it wouldn't be a great experience.” Great phrasing!! So true