I am running Quicken Windows 2006. I use the ESPP buy function to purchase shares, I indicate the number of shares purchased, price, beginning period/value, ending period/value and discount percentage. This appears to work fine. When I go to sell the shares it does not let me select lotds and then says there are no shares to sell. In the summary view it shows the total shares (950) but when I expand the detail ("+") it only shows previously sold shares and does not display the unsold shares lots (totaling 950). I do use the same name for the account and the security "Company ESPP". Any ideas?
Programs like ESPP often create this kind of problem in Quicken. Almost always, it's a result of rounding. Not just the visible rounding that we can see, but the invisible rounding that Quicken does behind the scenes - or the binary-arithmetic rounding that every computer has to do in converting to/from decimal numbers.
Do not enter the price. Let Quicken calculate it.
When we input transactions we are tempted to enter all the data we have, including - especially - the price per share. This often creates tiny fractional shares that don't show up in the visible part of Quicken, but are lurking to surprise us - perhaps months or years later - when we think we've sold our last shares, but Quicken disagrees.
If we buy 3 shares for $100, we probably will get a document that says we paid $33.33 per share. It might even show more decimals: $33.333333 per share. If we tell Quicken that we spent $100 for shares at $33.33 each, Quicken will show us that we got 3.000 shares, but it will remember that we actually have 3.000300 shares (rounded internally from
3.0003000300030003000300030003). If we later sell all our shares and tell Quicken that we sold 3 shares, it will think that we still have .000300 shares left. Since we can't see that hidden fraction, we have no idea how many fractional shares we need to sell to bring it to zero. The same kind of rounding errors can make Quicken think that we don't have quite as many shares left as we're trying to sell.
To avoid such problems, always enter each transaction in even dollars and cents of cash spent or received, and in even shares bought or sold. For ESPP transactions, enter share fractions in the same way and to the same precision that the plan does, probably 3 decimal places. To buy 3 shares for $100, enter $100.00 as the purchase price and 3 (or 3.000) as the number of shares purchased. Quicken will round the price per share to $3.333333, but it will display it as $3.333 or $3.33 (depending on settings in Quicken Preferences under Reports and Graphs). This price per share never gets used in any calculations, so the rounding doesn't really matter.
For sales of less than all your shares, enter the actual number sold, rounded as required by the ESPP, then tell Quicken to select lots and guide it to select shares until it has enough to equal the number sold. You can still enter the price per share sold, but when Quicken tells you that your arithmetic is wrong, let it adjust the per-share price, making sure the actual dollars and cents you received is correct.
Then, to sell ALL your shares, check the box to "Sell all shares in this account" and let Quicken clean up any rounding differences. Make sure the dollars received are correct, letting the per-share calculation vary as required.
Thanks for your response, I have read about the rounding errors but do not think that is my problem here. The summary shows that I have 950 shares in the account. I even tried just selling 1 of tose shares and it says I have none available. Again when I expand the detail on the summary to see the lots that comprise the 950 shares I can only see previously sold lots (greyed out) and none of the unsold lots - this is true in every view in the summary.
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