Share purchase dates

What Q product are you running?  What product year?  What release?

You responses to those questions will determine how we can help you.

Jim Harman said:

In Windows 2017 Premier and IIRC earlier versions you can produce a report of all your tax lots by going to Investing/Portfolio. Under the Show dropdown, pick a view you don't mind changing. Customize it with the columns you want to see, presumably including the Name and number of shares. Group by Accounts then click on Expand All at the bottom. You can print this by selecting File/Print Portfolio.

The default is to print holdings as of today, but you can change the date if you want.

I keep my statements anyway.  It can always be argued against you that you finagled the Q records.

Did you try the method I described? It doesn't answer your question directly, but when you group by Accounts, you will see each of the securities in the account with a plus sign next to it. When you click on Expand All, the first column shows the purchase date of each lot currently held, from oldest to newest. To answer your question, look down the dates to find the earliest date in each account, and you can toss all the statements before then.

Another tip: customize the view to exclude money market funds and other fixed-price holdings because they may have a lot of transactions but will never have a capital gain to worry about. You can also exclude tax deferred accounts if you want, because you don't have to worry about capital gains there either.

In my case it is 5 pages in landscape so it only takes a few seconds. I print this report as of Jan 1 each year so I have a printed record of my tax lots and cross lots off as I sell them. 

If you have many years of history in Quicken, you may want to go back to show your holdings as of 7 years ago for this report, because theoretically the IRS might question a return from several years ago.

Does anyone out there have experience bringing Quicken reports in for an IRS audit? I bet these records are so much better than what most people have that the examiner would accept them.

My only experience was once when I forgot to report a mutual fund sale. The IRS sent a correction notice showing tax due assuming that the cost basis was zero, when actually the sale was at a loss. I filed a corrected return with the correct basis, thanked them for pointing out the error and happily cashed my refund check.  Thanks, Quicken!