New at this kind of stuff so be gentle :) What follows is complicated, but I'm trying to provide as much as I can to see if someone can help me.
Several years ago my IRA investments got crazy. I had to convert about 15 months of Roth IRA contributions back to a Traditional IRA due to my income having exceeded fed guidelines.
Now the Feds have allowed us to convert them back to a Roth so long as we're prepared to pay the taxes on the Traditional IRA gains as we convert. Knowing my gains were minimal at best (most likely negative) I did the conversion. Now I need to do the actual math and see what (if any) taxes are owed.
So, I go back to Quicken Deluxe 2009 and start running reports in Quicken. First report was a "Portfolio Value and Cost Basis" from day one to 8/9/2010 (day be fore the conversion) and the balance (in $) in reported day before the sale didn't match what my brokerage claimed on my 1099-R (or Quicken's sale transaction entered the next day). I then realized that the daily price differed from the next day's sale price so I made them match...and the balance was still off...see numbers below:
Sale (brokerage statement and Quicken sale transaction): 1,949.579 shares @ $10.25/sh = $19,983.18 Portfolio Value and Cost Basis" report balance: 1,949.579 shares @ $10.25/sh = $19,993.19
$10.01 doesn't sound like much but I would think it should be exact (the math on the "sale" line is exactly correct and reflected in both the Quicken sale line and matches the brokerage statement).
That's question one...why. What can I look for to understand why the report is goofy?
Since I knew the balance number was wrong, I felt I couldn't trust the cost basis value either so I started digging into it. I looked at the opening balance of the current account...recall it was created by transferring shares from another account (two separate transactions to match the brokerage statement). Due to the nature of the transactions, I should have transferred the last ones entered into the original Roth IRA account into the new Traditional account, the earliest of which was Feb 2005. However when I look at the shares that were transferred they go back several years farther than that. So I went back, made sure the sale dialog box used "last in" and then recalculated the registers (ctrl-z). The dates on the new account transactions were better, but amazingly enough the cost basis didn't change one penny. So I closed and reopened quicken. The dates were screwed up again. Rats.
OK, so I tried something crazy. I deleted the two original transfer transactions, hoping I could recreate them. However, the matching transactions in the new account did not go away as I anticipated (there were way more transactions created in the new account than in the old account), so I deleted them. I then recreated the sale transactions...and amazingly enough there were just two matching transactions, but both referenced the sale price at the time of transfers and not the original purchase price as should be when calculating cost basis.
So all this leads to ...how do I calculate the cost basis for an investment in Quicken that included an intermediate transfer from one account to another?
Thanks for hanging in this far...