"Category" usage when creating investment account?

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?

Thanks RC for the advice which I will use; but my original question still stands; do you (or anyone) know what I can do so that by running a single report (perhaps with fancy criteria in effect), I can find the value of the original money that was supplied (perhaps not the 'tax' value...but I can deal with that).

I was hoping to be able to use a single 'category' that could be used in both creating the account as well as when adding $ to it from the 'outside' as well.

(This actually happened about 5 years ago, but I was curious what the value was over the weekend and found I add to do a lot of 'forensic' Quicken work!)

Maybe I am not making myself clear in which case, it isn't that big a deal!

I'm looking in Q '11 H&B.

The only Investment Account XTypes on which I see Category exposed are: Income (& only if you populate the Misc Inc. value), Miscellaneous Expense, Write Check, Deposit, Withdraw, Online Payment (maybe, none of my accounts are enabled for that, so it stops me in my tracks), Other Cash Transactions

All of those are Cash related, so if you're dealing with cash, you should be able to create one. If you've got Securities, neither Categories nor Tags are exposed for those XTypes.

You might be able to put someting in the Memo field for each transaction, but if the different sources ended up with the same security, your brokerage may consolidate things like Dividends into a single Xctn. You'd have to break those out with separate Xctns & you'd have to balance the net of those against your Brokerage Statement. You could also set up "shadow" securities. You'd have to manually update prices, but it could work.

That's just the Quicken side of things. There are other, non-Quicken factors that may warrant investigation. For instance, if you live in what is referred to as a Community Property State, you might want to keep your Separate Property in an entirely different account for traceability. If you've got any need to do anything like that, it might be good practice to maintain each pool in separate actual accounts (Brokerage & Quicken).

Bartt wrote: ....

Thanks Bartt - this looks like something I just will try to manually do and keep track of. Doesn't seem like an easy way although the memo field idea is interesting and maybe I'll see if I Can give that a shot.

Thanks for replying.

"Andrew" wrote

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?).

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Assuming I understand what you want:

How about creating a liability account with one record for the amount of the inheritance.

Create a report that includes only the ongoing inheritance investment account and the liability account with a balance equal to the original inheritance. The balance of the liability account will be the amount you inherited, naturally. The report total will be the change in value of the investment account since you inherited it.

Save the report (and put an icon on the Quicken Toolbar to run it, if you like).

Hide the liability account and don't use it in any other reports, etc.