Please Help Entering CD's

Goggle the archives for 'Quicken Certificate Deposit' and you'll see a lot of different answers to this age-old question. Since there isn't a well-defined way that Quicken provides, various people have tried various approaches over the years. Personally, I name each CD a different 'security', value it at $1/share, and manually use Reinvest Interest transactions monthly.

You just select CD in the security type field, asset class is cash. The price would usually be 1.

Hi, Avraham.

Right! But you and I are not the stupid ones! Quicken does NOT understand Certificates of Deposit. :>(

We have ranted here about that many times over the past several years. Yes, the recent versions of Quicken CLAIM to be able to handle CD's, but as soon as we try to actually record the purchase, interest income (especially compounding), and redemption at maturity, it is obvious that the programmers actually are quite clueless ("stupid") about CD's.

In lieu of a satisfactory solution from Intuit, we in this newsgroup have devised several workarounds, which you can find by searching the archives, using Google Newsgroups, perhaps. None of the workarounds are really satisfactory. I came up with my solution several Quicken versions ago, so there may be better ways available now.

I created a new Investment Account, called "CDs". Here I've recorded several CD's over the years from several different banks. Each CD is a separate Security, in Quicken parlance. The purchase is fairly straightforward: I just enter a Buy, showing a $10,000 CD, for example, as

10 shares at $1,000 each. Sales are easy enough to record, too, so long as you've made entries to recognize increases in the value from compounding. (Quicken probably will report a Sale with Zero gain.)

Interest received by check must be recorded each time; there is no way to schedule entries in Investment Accounts. You can schedule them in a cash account (Checking or Undeposited Checks, for example), but such income does not get tied to the CD in the Security View for the CD. I've taken a two-step approach: I've scheduled the transaction - simply as a reminder - in my Checking Account where the interest is automatically transferred, but I don't Enter this scheduled transaction each month (or quarter). Instead, I open the CDs Account and record the Memorized Investment Transaction - and then Skip the scheduled checking transaction, so that it will remind me again next month to go through the two steps again.

For compound interest, I've created an Excel spreadsheet for each CD and calculated the interest for each compounding period to maturity. Then, each month, I record the ReinvInt to recognize the income and to add the amount to the balance of the CD asset. To get around the inability to schedule these investment transactions, I "bit the bullet" and went ahead and entered ALL the future monthly amounts until maturity into the Transaction List. Each month, Quicken moves the current transaction from below the "current" line in the register. (The bank and I often disagree on the interest amount by a few cents; I adjust that at year-end or maturity, or whenever I get a statement.)

The bottom line is that Intuit has not seen fit to fix this simple (it seems to me) programming problem, even after years of adding bells and whistles to Quicken.

RC

Just want to thank the folks who replied to my call for help. It's good to know that it wasn't me at fault. Money has a good setup for CD's and I thought Quicken would be the same. Wrong. So far I am finding Quicken more to my liking and with this one exception easier for me to use.

As a variation on this scheme I schedule the transaction as a transfer from the Investment Account then after entering the transaction go to the matching transaction. There I edit that transaction, changing it from a cash transfer to an interest payment for the appropriate CD. The transaction will already have the transfer to the checking account and does not alter the checking account when saved.

John Beurket

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You can schedule investment account transactions by setting up a "Group" Scheduled Transaction, which can include one, or more, memorized investment account transactions.

If your CD interest was the same each time, the Quicken Scheduled Group transaction should be able to handle the recording of interest (tied to the specific CD) and the transferring of the proceeds to your checking account (an IntIncX transaction) ... without any further manual effort.

For the compounding situation, I assume the amount would not be the same each time, so the Quicken Group Scheduled transaction would not be all that was required; one would have to modify the amount in the investment account after the scheduled transaction was recorded.

Never having been in that situation, I can't say which I would prefer: manually entering all the interests transactions from scratch; or letting Quicken enter them as they occurred in the real-world, and having to modify their amount. But I think the option exists.

Hi, John.

Perhaps the situation has improved in recent versions of Quicken, but when I used the "Group Scheduled Transaction" method several years ago, it turned out to be more work - and more confusion - than the two-part method I've been using.

I will have to enter all the future compounding transactions some day anyhow, so I just take some time now and do them all at once. I can see all the future dates in the Register, below the blue line indicating the current date. And each month, that line moves down a notch and the interest income gets recorded with no further action from me, unless a correction is needed at year-end.

Until Intuit sees fit to fix this...

RC