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How should I handle this IRA investment transaction?

Just noticed something funny in Q - is this working the way it should?

I have a Money Market account and a stock account (2 separate Q accounts, both labeled as 'IRA' accounts) as part of my IRA at Vanguard. Reason for two different accounts is that they have different account numbers at Vanguard.

I sold some shares of one of the stocks in the IRA stock account and the resultant cash went into the stock account's cash balance on day one, according to the transaction in Q.

Subsequently on day 2, it was swept automatically into the IRA Money Market account (As it should). So far, so good.

But the transaction that ended up being automatically entered into the Money Market account on day 2 is labeled 'Contribx' (the full transaction type in the detail screen is 'Cash Transferred into Account' and the target source of the cash is the IRA Stock Account as it should). Q is labeling '2006' as the tax year.

This somehow seems wrong to me- I am NOT making any new cash additions into my IRA as a result of this. Isn't this what Q is indicating I have done? Do I need to manually edit the transaction to simply move cash (not a Contribution?) from the Stock account to the Money Market account?

(I saw earlier that there was a concept of 'linked' money market accounts, but when I tried to see if that was doable here a few weeks back, I never got the correct results indicating I could do this.)

Reply to
Andrew
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Because it's late on a Saturday night, I'll try a quick answer; I don't assume it is definitive, but that it hopefully contains some useful info.

In my experience, Quicken is not capable of making the sorts of distinctions that you need. I think it is a design flaw in Quicken; I have mentioned it (or at least something very similar) several times before.

There are certain "transfers" that Quicken has never (in my experience) been able to distinguish between "contributions", and "exchanges" which have zero impact on taxes or returns. For example, transfers into tax-deferred accounts are generally "contributions" as far as Quicken is concerned ... regardless of the source of the transfer. It has been this way for as long as I can remember.

I am also not sure what the bottom line impact of this "flaw" is (I don't use Turbo Tax, for example).

I don't have the energy at the moment to delve into my research, or other's posts, on the subject, but I think you will find this issue has been discussed before - either here and/or in the Intuit forums ... though perhaps not in the depth to which you would prefer. Probably others here can shed much more light than I.

Reply to
John Pollard

Thanks John - I will look into the archives as you suggest. I do try to remember topics that have been discussed in case I get 'bit' by them in the future; I'll check into this.

I *do* use Turbotax, but I have always maintained that one should not blindly use Q's data transfer...at the least, double check. In my particular case, I simply print the tax reports from Q via schedules, validate the #s against 1099s and the like, and *manually* enter the data into TT....I just don't trust Q to do this correctly. It is true that I don't have overly complicated taxes, especially when it comes to Schedule "D" as I am not that active a trader (and of course, inside my IRA, any sales don't generated reportable Capital Gains anyway). Maybe if I spent more time trying to get transactions into Q correctly (but I do spend enough time just trying to get the amounts accurate!) this would work better, but it seems to me that the 'real' data you get from 1099s is what you should be using in reality.

Hope everyone remembered to change their clocks back today, except for our friends in certain states that don't do that!

--------------- Regards -

- Andrew

Reply to
Andrew

"Andrew" wrote

I tried a quick test this morning using Q2006 Premier, R4.

Instead of initiating the transaction in the FROM account, try initiating it in the TO account; and make it a "Deposit" transaction using the FROM account as the category.

Reply to
John Pollard

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