Category assignment for income/dividends

stevewi

I have two brokerage accounts:

• a taxable one &
• an IRA that is tax-deferred

When I enter dividends/interest transactions I can assign them to the standard Investments:Dividend Income & Investments:Interest Income categories. This works great for the taxable brokerage account.

However, for the tax-deferred account I cannot assign dividends/interest transactions to the standard Investments:Dividend Income Tax-Free & Investments:Interest Income Tax-Free categories. I can't even reassign them once entered.

Why not? This seems to be a long-standing bug. Thanks.

MontanaKarl

Your IRA accounts will not show up in an taxable income reports, so does it matter? The automatic assignment to taxable or tax-free categories is, as far as I know, tied to the taxable status of the security. So, tax exempt bonds, for example, go to tax exempt interest no matter what account they're in while taxable ones for to 'interest'.

If you are generating reports other than tax reports where this is frustrating, then just filter out your tax-deferred accounts and memorize the report for future use.

jacobs

When I enter dividends/interest transactions I can assign them to the standard Investments:Dividend Income& Investments:Interest Incomecategories.

How are you entering the dividend/interest transactions? In an investment account, you don't select categories at all; the Type of the transaction is used by Quicken to properly "categorize" the transactions. So its you receive a cash dividend, you enter the transaction as Type=Income (Div Int, Dist) > Dividends; then enter the Security issuing the dividend and the Amount. There's no place to specify a category.

As @MontanaKarl said, the determination of whether dividend/interest income shows up on a tax report is determined by whether the account is a retirement account or not. Quicken uses the internal category Investments:Dividend Income Tax-Free when the security reporting income is set up as tax free (such as a tax-free government or municipal bond fund). But you still enter the transaction exactly the same as a dividend from a regular (taxable) security.