The Payee on a reinvested dividends is incorrect

Question

I'm comparing income from this year to last year. I run the comparison report 'income and expense comparison by category.' I want to look at dividends by security to see what has changed.

If I double click on dividend income in the comparison report, then select subtotal by payee (there is no subtotal by security), it will give the correct subtotal for each security if it's a regular dividend.

But it considers each reinvestment dividend transaction as a separate payee.  As an example, I have security ABC, and one dividend reinvestment buys 52 new shares of ABC and another one buys 55 shares of ABC. When I subtotal by payee, it shows two separate payees - one payee will be '52 ABC' and the other payee will be '55 ABC' In other words it creates a payee that concatenates the number of shares with the security name.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Jim_Harman · Answer

The issue comes in the Income/Expense by Payee Comparison report because for some investing transactions, the Payee field includes the number of shares in the transaction along with the security name.

In addition to reinvested dividends, these transactions include reinvested interest and capital gains distributions. Dividends and other income received in cash just include the security name.

If you just want to see dividend income for each security, you would have to customize the report to just include the _DivInc category.

This issue also affects the Spending > Income and Expense by Payee report.

I can't think of a situation where we would want to see the share counts in these reports, but as far as I know, the share counts been present for years and this is the first time I have heard anyone complain about it. I don't think Quicken should simply drop the share counts from the Payee names. Perhaps there could be a "Include share count with Payee" customization option.

HLT · Answer

I have submitted the problem to Quicken using help→ 'report a problem'

And thanks for the other suggestions, that I can use in the meantime.

Jim_Harman · Answer

The problem is that the Banking, Spending, and Comparison reports don't have a Security column, just the computed "Description" or "Payee" column which holds either the Payee, the Security, or for reinvestments, the number of shares and the Security name.

Another option would be to use the two Investment Income reports, one for each year.

Subtotal by Security and customize the report to include just the _DivInc Category and any others you want.

This will produce reports with one column for each security.

Or even better, use the Income by Security report. Set the date range to 1/1/24 thru 12/31/25, sort by security, and subtotal by year. Click on the gear to customize the report and select the columns you want to include. This report will have a subtotaled section for each year.

[Added 10/13] Yet another possibility would be to use the relatively new Net Worth & Balances > Lifetime Overview report. For each year this gives a customizable summary of various types of income and expenses. For each item you can double click to drill down and see the details.

If necessary, you could export these reports to Excel and manipulate the data there to make comparisons by Security.