Mutual fund share conversion for Mac

It's a shortcoming of Quicken Mac which requires the user to manually jump through hoops. This should be implemented in Quicken Mac.

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Not everyone uses a brokerage which has multiple classes of shares for the same fund, as Vanguard does. But for those of us who do, and have to deal with trying to record in Quicken a change from "Investor" shares to "Admiral" shares (or similar with other brokerages), it's a source of great frustration that there is no such tool in Quicken Mac. Especially when we learn that it is a feature in Quicken Windows, and the CEO long ago promised efforts to move Quicken Mac towards relative parity with Quicken Windows.

For anyone who might not understand this request, the details are pretty simple. Some brokerages will have two (or more) classes of a specific fund. The higher-level shares — "Admiral" class at Vanguard — are for investors with a larger balance in the fund, who are rewarded with a slightly lower management fee resulting in slightly higher earnings.

The problem for Quicken is that the share price of the basic ("Investor" class at Vanguard) share and the higher level shares are usually different, and the ticker symbols are different, so you have to create the new high-level security and move the dollar value of your holdings into that security. You can't do a Sell transaction from one fund and a Buy in the other fund, because that generates taxable income and resets your cost basis — which is not the case in the real-world transaction. You can only do a Remove Shares and and Add Shares transaction to avoid any income from being recognized, but doing so leaves behind your individual lots and original cost basis. Unless you do a Remove Shares and a Buy Shares transaction for every single purchase and reinvestment in the original account back to the beginning of your investments in the account — a tedious process at best and a nearly impossible one if you've held the account for some time and have lots of reinvestment transactions in the account. (This generally isn't a problem in a retirement account, where cost basis doesn't matter, but it's a big issue in a non-retirement investment account.)

Quicken Windows apparently has a Mutual Fund Conversion menu option which automatically creates all the Remove Shares and Buy Shares transactions at the press of a button. Quicken Mac investors need the same functionality! And the Quicken Mac developers already created similar functionality for moving a security from one brokerage account to another (for example, if you move an account from Vanguard to Schwab). In this case, we need to move from one security to another, within the same account. The process is the same, but the current user interface for Transfer Shares doesn't allow for this use case.

If you care abbot Quicken maintaining your correct cost basis and gains/losses, and if you use or might in the future use a brokerage company which has multiple cases of shares for its funds, please vote for this feature by scrolling to the top of this screen and clicking the little dark arrow in the yellow box under the first post.

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