Hi, Andrew.
My good advice: Do it "right" right from the beginning. Otherwise, you'll be posting a few years from now asking how to untangle the mess made by taking shortcuts.
Without knowing the details, I can't make specific suggestions, but it sounds like you need to create an Investment Account in your Quicken, just as though you had purchased the (multiple?) assets in that investment account. The general rule for inheritances, of course, is that you get a new basis in each asset equal to its value on the decedent's date of death, NOT on the day that the account is transferred to you, and that your holding period in your hands for each such asset starts with that date of death. Transactions (dividends and interest received, purchases and sales, etc.) that occur between the date of death and the date you receive the account probably should be reported by the executor of the estate, but that depends on facts not yet disclosed.
Careful! The tax rules for all this are not as simple as you make it sound, and they can't always be discerned by just using "common sense". You probably need some advice from your own CPA. The good news is that, once you get the starting point properly recorded, future accounting for the assets and income are no worse than for assets that you purchase.
RC
-- R. C. White, CPA San Marcos, TX (Retired. No longer licensed to practice public accounting.) snipped-for-privacy@grandecom.net Microsoft Windows MVP (2002-2010) (Using Quicken 2012 Deluxe R 5 and Windows Live Mail in Win7 x64)
Question - Can one create a category (or some other easy to report mechanism) such that when one receives an investment account through an inheritance then adds additional monies to it from additional payouts from other sources (for example, sale of property), one can easily report on the *total* of all monies received? (Both for the original creation as well as individual checks added to it subsequently?).
Any good ideas?