Investments that aren't stocks - help!

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Garry W 20 years ago

I am a Quicken user of many years' standing.

My simplified questions:

- Is there any way to generate an accurate "investment performance" report in Quicken for =real estate= investments?

- Is there any other program I could use instead of Quicken to do it?

More details:

I find myself in urgent need of an accounting program that can generate investment performance reports for investments which =aren't= stocks or mutual funds.

Quicken does not seem to have the feature of doing non-stock returns-in-investment. (I just upgraded to Q2006 on the off chance that something had changed in the last few years, but no such luck.)

I have several real estate investments which I've been improving, selling and replacing, and it's just getting too hairy to continue making the ROI computations on my own.

Per the Quicken manual, Quicken Ên= track real estate as a raw "asset". You apparently are supposed to use the asset account to keep track of at least a basis price. But I can see no easy way to get real estate investment performance reports, or tax reports out of the dumb program. Quicken doesn't even seem to have any way to mark a non-stock transaction as a capital gain. (Well, yes, you can =mark= it as a _RlzdGain, _UnrlzdGain, or a "_LT CapGnDst" --- but the program will completely ignore those markings when it generates a cap gains report.)

(There is a crazy way of getting Quicken to do it right: you pretend to the program that the real estate is a "stock" or "mutual fund". In that scenario, capital improvements to the property become negative "returns of capital", general property expenses become negative "stock dividends", rent receipts become positive "stock dividends", unrealized gains become changes to the "stock price", etc. Quicken then generates the right reports! -- but the ledger entries turn into a giant mess instead.)

Anybody know any way to do =real= non-stock investment tracking in Quicken?

Is there any other product I could replace Quicken with that can do it? (MS Money, being a clone of Quicken, seems to handle this identically to Quicken.)

Many thanks.

Garry

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Paul_B 20 years ago

Interesting problem. You can create your own category for real estate appreciation, and connect it to the Schedule D cap gains/losses Tax category. But for reports, even accessed via the Tax item rather than Investing, Quicken still doesn't include anything but Investment accounts, so you're out in the cold.

I would think this is a shortcoming. They're all over the Help files asking to be contacted with suggestions, and this would seem a prime candidate.

Other than that, you could export your asset account info to spreadsheet format, and run your own formulas and charts.

Paul

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Garry W 20 years ago

Hi Paul -

Last night I ended up doing that - with success. I wouldn't want to have to do it very often, but it can be made to work.

Here's the gory details, for those who might ever want to generate a rate of return for something other than a stock...

First, I used a Quicken "class" to tag -all- the transactions relating to a specific piece of real estate. (To apply the tag I ran Find/Replace a bunch... I -hope- I tagged them all.)

I then generated a Quicken transaction report, limited to that new tag class, sorted by date, and being careful not to include the register-to-register transactions twice in the report...

I exported the Quicken report to Excel ("Copy" button on the Quicken report, then pasted in Excel)...

In Excel, I then patched up the split-transactions that Quicken chose not to supply dates for in its transaction report (grrr, see below) (Excel

-really- needs to have the dates)...

I then applied the "XIRR" function in Excel to the transaction dates and amounts. And it gave what appeared to be a plausible number.

For a test of the above, I then created a dummy series of stock transactions in Quicken, to mimic one of the real estate transaction sequences, and asked Quicken for its opinion of the rate of return on that dummy stock.

And, lo and behold, when everything is done just right, the Excel-generated number for the real-estate is -identical- to the Quicken-generated number for the fake stock. Yay!!

Would'a'been nice if Quicken could have just done the IRR calculation itself

-- it has all the data just sitting there. Oh well.

Garry

PS - I had trouble with the split transactions because Quicken-2006 refused to allow me to turn off the report / Customize / Display / "Breakdown of split trans" checkbox. A bug in Quicken? (I'm -shocked-, -shocked-... :)

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Investments that aren't stocks - help!

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