ESPP shares and non-ESPP shares in same account

I have some ESPP shares that I track in Quicken. I moved the shares into my brokerage account, which also has shares of the same security that are non-ESPP shares. When Quicken downloads data from my broker, it decides that I have more shares of that stock, according to the broker, than in my register (the extra being the ESPP shares) and that I have no shares, according to my broker, of the ESPP, and that my shares in the register must be lacking a placeholder.

For example, if I have 15,000 of stock, and 10,000 are ESPP shares, Quicken will tell me that I have 15,000 shares of the stock, but my register shows 5,000, and I have 0 shares of the ESPP but my register shows 10,000. Then it wants to put in place holders. They both have the same ticker symbol of course.

Keeping the shares in different accounts is not an option since my broker will report them as being in the account whn I download data. It was tough enough getting the data in in the first place since the shares came from two different options accounts and two ESPP accounts, and Quicken could not handle the stock options, since some were done as a stock swap. So I had originally put in the stock option shares as ordinary shares and calculated the cost basis manually. And the ESPP shares were originally entered before Quicken handled ESPP, so I already went through redoing those when that feature was added. I don't want to go through anything again that I can avoid, but I don't want to be nagged every time I download data that things don't agree, when they really do agree. Is there a way around this?

Reply to
Wai Doan Hsu
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I don't know a lot about ESPP securities, just what I glean from entering some test data for them. And I'm not sure that my testing is exhaustive enough to provide you with a conclusive answer. But here's what I have discovered.

Quicken expects ESPP securities to have different names and a different security "Type" (Type=ESPP) than their regularly traded namesakes. If your ESPP shares are recorded to the same security name as the non-ESPP shares, I believe that could be at least a part of your problem. (I am guessing the ESPP security will get a different CUSIP number as that seems to be the standard key to matching downloaded securities to Quicken securities. Unfortunately, recent versions of Quicken have taken to hiding the CUSIP number, so it is not easy to confirm what is happening with CUSIPs).

If you originally entered transactions for ESPP shares into Quicken before Quicken began offerring ESPP capabilities, you may now have to re-enter the ESPP transactions to a new ESPP security that you create in Quicken. And the only way you can create an ESPP security is to use the "Bought ESPP shares" wizard. I have not tried to examine all the ramifications of this.

Reply to
John Pollard

Thanks. Let me give a few details. I did indeed enter the ESPP shares before Quicken supported them, but once it did, I removed all of them, and reentered every single one. Quicken never asked about a CUSIP number, but did ask about a ticker symbol. The actual certificates I had had the same CUSIP number as any other shares. Since Quicken gets the stock data based on symbol, but it still had me enter it as a different security, (i.e. company name [space] ESPP) it could differentiate between the share types.

I also had a stock option that I exercised. I did that with a stock swap, which means that I gave them a certain number of my existing shares, which they accepted at market value, and they used the money to issue me a larger number of new shares at the option price. Thus I ended up with some shares that were from a stock option, but I had to enter them as regular shares, since Quicken would not let me do it as a stock swap.

With the option shares, they appear as regular shares and ESPP shares, and I put in the cost basis for different lots so that the math works out based on tax laws. The way the law works, if I give 50 shares, and get back 100, then the cost basis for 50 of the new shares is the original cost basis of the swapped shares, and the cost basis of the rest is the amount of cash paid, if any. So out of the shares I got back, some were still considered ESPP shares, which I left alone, and the rest had a cost basis of a few dollars, which Quicken would not let me put in if I left it as a stock option, since it did not reflect the exercise price. So Quicken shows them as two different securities, but both have the same ticker symbol.

Eventually, I took my paper certificates for both types of shares, and gave them to Fidelity to put in my brokerage account. Fidelity just sees them all as shares of the same security. They are in the same account. So Fidelity reports the total number of shares I have, while Quicken sees it as shares of two different securities. Even though Quicken has two different securities listed in the security list, I have no idea how it associates them with the data it gets from my broker. I assumed it would go by ticker symbol, since when I enter a new stock into quicken, that's essentially all I'm giving it to go by. But why it decides that the downloaded data matches one security with that ticker symbol, but not another, is what I don't get. I also assume that even if a CUSIP number is in the data, it would be the same one for all shares, since Quicken correctly sees the total number of shares being reported by the broker. It just assumes that I have fewer, since it sees the ESPP shares as a different security.

Reply to
Wai Doan Hsu

Older versions of Quicken made the CUSIP number visible for securities and allowed the user to enter it. Visibility is now gone.

Quicken has always (since Q2000 anyway) allowed more than one security with the same ticker; that's not the problem. The problem is how Quicken knows which Quicken security should be associated with which downloaded security.

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I'm fairly sure that the OFX standard for identifying securities is CUSIP number; ticker is not used. Moot now.

If ESPP shares and non-ESPP shares have the same CUSIP number, that is one strike against accurate identification of downloaded security data.

The only other means I know of for Quicken to use to distinguish between two securities in a download for the same Quicken account is the name of the security.

If Fidelity is identifying your downloaded ESPP shares and non-ESPP shares with the same name and the same CUSIP, I know of no way for Quicken to differentiate them. So they will all be treated as the same security ... hard to say why Quicken picked one over the other, but the results would be equally unsatisfying no matter which one was chosen.

If you can get Fidelity to use a different name in the download for the ESPP shares, you might be able to solve the problem.

Reply to
John Pollard

That might be nice, but I'm assuming it would never happen. Fidelity doesn't know or care which shares are which, because I just gave them a bunch of certificates, all with the same CUSIP number, to put in my account. I can define the lots based on each individual certificate, and tell them which to sell, and then it's up to me to worry about taxes, etc. But they still see it as a bunch of shares of the same stock with the same CUSIP.

I'm not sure what relevance the name has either since Quicken has always let me use whatever name I wanted for stocks, but seemed to get the data if the symbol was correct. So entering IBM or International BM gave the same results if I used IBM as the symbol. Since Fidelity never even knew what I called the stock in Quicken, and since I was never prompted to match things up when I did a download, the only thing I can conclude is that Quicken went by the ticker symbol since I never gave it a CUSIP and there was no other identifying information.

I did notice that when I had regular shares and restricted shares of the same stock, Fidelity listed them separately on statements and on line, but the downloads still gave me that aggregate amounts, which was how Quicken saw it anyway.

It's also been my experience when I speak to Fidelity that they will tell me that they are reporting my information correctly, and it's up to Intuit to fix. I have another issue with Quicken being unable to handle multiple retirement accounts and Fidelity has told me that they're aware of it, and they've discussed the problem with Intuit, and maybe Intuit will fix it soon. But the problem stays there in release after release. In this case, Quicken does not seem to understand that with 401(k)s there's an account number for the entire account, so if a husband and wife have the same employer for example, they will have the same account number. Even though Quicken has enough identifying information to associate it with one Quicken account or another, it will not let me set up the second one for automatic download since it says that all all accounts which use this customer number at this financial institution have already been activated. The statement isn't even true, and Quicken isn't even trying to go by my customer number here. But Intuit seems to have gone from trying to conform to how the rest of the world does financial data to expecting the rest of the world to conform to them. So I doubt that Fidelity will change it in this case either.

Reply to
Wai Doan Hsu

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