Reinvest Dividends: transaction vs report

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Naruroa
Naruroa Member ✭✭
in Investing (Mac)
Newbie to the community here. Using QMac 5.17.6. As others have said, Reinvest Dividend implies two transactions, a dividend payment and a buy. My problem arises in trying to generate a report. For reports, you have to choose categories, but the Investment category, which is used internally by Quicken and cannot be changed, does not include the subcategory Reinvest Dividend (though it does include Reinvest Cap Gains). When I generate an investment report, Quicken does what it can: it lumps in all Reinvest Dividends with plain Dividends, inflating my Dividend total. That would be fine if there were also a "Buy" listing for the second implied transaction, but there is not. So when I feed the investment report numbers into a separate spreadsheet for further analysis, things like ROI obviously come out wrong. I now know why my ROI calculations have disagreed with Quicken's for all these years! I understand there's a workaround for QWin (setting preferences to display hidden transactions), but what about QMac?
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  • jacobs
    jacobs SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
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    I'm trying to understand the problem. Whether you receive a cash dividend or reinvest it makes no difference in terms of what you have received. If you want a report of dividends, it rightly includes all dividends; I don't see how this can be considered inflating your dividend total. The act of reinvesting a dividend is essentially a separate purchase of additional shares that is inconsequential to the dividend you received.

    If our do a Cash Flow report in Quicken, Dividends and Reinvested Dividends are listed together as Dividend Income. This is correct. The act of buying additional shares through automatic reinvesting is essentially a like transfer from having cash in the investment account to having more shares in the investment account -- a transfer within the account which is not income/money in nor expense/money out.  That Buy doesn't change your income, expenses, assets, or net worth. 

    That said, the ability to generate Investment reports in Quicken Mac is certainly lacking and incomplete. The developers have been working for two years to build the new reports engine used for the actual reports on the Reports menu -- but they have not yet added investments to those reports. So we're left with what we can specify in the Portfolio view -- which must be set up each time since it can't be saved like a report, and which doesn't have all the options users would want. We can only hope that as the developers feel the pieces for the existing reports are growing complete, they will turn attention to being able to generate true investment reports. 
    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • Naruroa
    Naruroa Member ✭✭
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    Thanks for your perspective. All you say about dividends and net worth is certainly true. My problem, distilled down to its essentials, is that Investment Type is different from Category. I was naively assuming that they should be the same, that what is available when qualifying a transaction should also be available when making a report. But why? They are different animals.

    Now that I finally recognise that Reinvest Dividend is not an acceptable Category (and probably shouldn't be), I can sort things out.

    Thanks again.
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