Investing Income Report Not Picking Up All Months - Help Please

Ken45140 · March 2021

I am using Win10 and Quicken/Windows Version 31.20 but have reverted to previous working
version 30.19 to see if that helps my problem. It did not. I have been working on this problem for the last four hours. I will really appreciate any help.

I want to create a report showing income from SS payments and IRA Rollover distributions.
Simple, however.... When I create an Investing Income report, I find that I get four
Income Categories: Income-Distribution, _DivInc, _IntInc, and -RlzdGain, but the problem is that Income-Distribution is missing from the first three months of last
year, as well as August, but is ok for all of the other months.

In inspecting the entries for Jan, Feb, Mar, which were updated from download and not
manually, I find several differences. I have been experimenting trying to get the
transaction details to match the "successful" months but have been unsuccessful.

I should say that I have not reconciled the investment accounts all this time, but
want the program to produce the correct report, once I can discover why there are
several missing months of entries for "Income-Distribution" category.

Inspecting the transactions for Jan, there is only one, a "Withdraw" action, no tags
or Category shown. When I click on the description field I see a Category/IRADist tag
attached. I do not remember if I made that entry as part of previous troubleshooting or
not. The same transaction exists for Feb.

Mar has two entries: a "WithdrawX" Action with Transfer showing in the Cash Amt column.
Below it is a "Withdraw" Action with a Checking Account Description and "IRA Dist" tag.

April, the first month which shows up in the Income Report, shows the same two transactions as does March and the other correct months; a "WithdrawX" and a "Withdraw" action in the next entry.

This pattern repeats from April through December. Yet August again has no Income-Distribution amount but all the other months do.

I have tried a number of changes, all to no avail. Selecting the IRA Rollover account transaction (May) and selecting go to Transfer reveals the proper transaction in my Checking Account along with the proper Tag. Doing the same thing with the March entry takes me to the proper Checking Account transaction.

What could be wrong? What can I do? I will appreciate any suggestions.
Many thanks,
Ken

Tom Young · March 2021

"What made this work (all months for last year showing proper "Income" was to make sure there were two transactions in the IRA account. 1) a WithdrawX action, destination the checking account, and 2) a Withdraw action, with Income Category titled "Income Distribution" along with a Tag "IRA Dist". When I manually added the Withdraw transaction in the IRA Register, along with its tag, then the two reports I want to use had all entries for all months."

You mentioned these two entries in you first post and I didn't understand it then and I still don't, in that entering the same dollar amount (I assume) twice - once as WithdrawX and again as Withdraw with a Category - should end up with your IRA's value being understated. How did that not happen?

There's absolutely no need for making two entries as the one Withdraw X can both be budgeted for and reported as a form of "income" in reports:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031128/uploads/editor/yh/cei8txhj18qh.jpg

Too, I'm not sure what the Tag is doing for you here since its nomenclature doesn't seem to distinguish from the Category. Seems like the Category is all you need.

Since I can't really look into your Quicken file I'm pretty much at sea here.

I'd think that the Investment Report - the "Investment Income" report? - would incorporate the IRA's as the Accounts that are feeding information to the report and show the distributions to checking:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031128/uploads/editor/nf/9bue4mlu3p3c.jpg

allowing you to see if your distributions from the IRA's are less than or more that the income generated.

Then your other report - showing budgeted for and actual income from Social Security and IRA distributions - would be along the lines of the first picture above, comprising one Category - Social Security incme - and multiple transfers - "FROM IRA1," FROM IRA2", etc.

Tom Young · March 2021

Well, it's pretty hard to follow with what's going on here, so maybe taking it in small chunks is the best approach - an "iterative" process essentially.

From the sounds of it you're getting the income elements - dividends, interest, etc. - that are inside the IRA Accounts, and you don't want that. So the first thing to do is to customize the report by going to the Accounts tab and making sure those IRA Accounts are not selected as Accounts "feeding" information to your report.. That should prevent those "_DivInc, _IntInc, and -RlzdGain" transactions from showing up.

I simply don't understand the " Income-Distribution" Category; I'm assuming these are the distributions out of the IRA Accounts and into your checking Account, and you don't account for the "other side" of these transactions, (the "first side" of the transactions is a reduction in cash in the IRA Account), by selecting a Category. The transfer of money is not income in a basic accounting sense, it's only moving cash from one Account to another Account. Of course "statutory" (tax) accounting does count it as income, and we can deal with that in Quicken by identifying the "other side" of the distribution out of the IRA - that's the deposit of cash into the checking Account - as a form of "income" identified as "FROM {IRA Account Name}" in the "Income" section of a report.

So as a first cut at your problem why don't you eliminate the IRA Account from feeding your report, and go through your IRA Account and anytime there's a real distribution out of the IRA and into the checking Account, make sure that transaction is account for as a transfer, and nothing else.

Post back if you need further help.

(I'll cut to the end game and tell you that the way you get transfers out of an IRA and into your checking Account to show up as "income" in the report is that you make sure the IRA Accounts are selected as Categories under the Category tab of the report and allowing transfers to show up in the report as allowed under the Advanced tab. These things frequently take some fine-tuning to get them to work perfectly, but it can be done.)

Ken45140 · March 2021

Tom: Thanks for taking a shot at my problem, which I appreciate. After many trials, I got both the Investment Income report and a Transaction report to work and show the proper numbers in the right places. If you have a moment, I would appreciate any words of explanation about what I did made this work. If not, thanks for your initial reply.

I understand that transfers from IRA to Checking is not really income, but it is what I need to see to budget and analyze against expenses (cash going out). What made this work (all months for last year showing proper "Income" was to make sure there were two transactions in the IRA account. 1) a WithdrawX action, destination the checking account, and 2) a Withdraw action, with Income Category titled "Income Distribution" along with a Tag "IRA Dist". When I manually added the Withdraw transaction in the IRA Register, along with its tag, then the two reports I want to use had all entries for all months.

I think I understand that the Transfer is not really "Income", but it serves my purpose. I am not sure why both transactions had to be entered in the IRA Register to show up properly in the various reports, and if you had a moment to comment and give me some insight, I would appreciate it. Nonetheless, your reply got me going and I thank you.
Ken

Tom Young · March 2021