Tags

Correction to the preceding. I should have said "I am running deluxe

Quicken basically ignores tags on transactions in investment investment accounts; when you create a transfer between two investment accounts, the tags on both resulting transactions are ignored.

Tracking distributions with tags may not be the way to go.

You could transfer to a checking account linked to the brokerage account you wanted the cash to go to; but that might present other problems, especially if you are downloading to that brokerage.

You could setup a dummy intermediate non-investment account to pass the funds through, but that would probably also require some extra work, and maybe not be feasible either.

You might be better off considering using some special text in the Memo field of the transactions you want to track for this purpose; but even here, you might need to do extra work if you want to see only one side of the transfers.

Many reports will allow you to select transactions based on the contents of the Memo field (see the "Matching", "Memo Contains" field on the "Categories" tab in most report Customize dialogs. You can setup some special text to put in the Memo field to identify your distributions, say, "##MRD" for example; then select on that in the Memo Contains field.

If you only want to see (track) one half of the pair of transfer transactions from a given transfer, you could enter the special text in the Memo field when you first Enter the transfer transaction. Then you could immediately Edit the resulting transaction and clear the memo field. Then the transaction in the FROM account would have a blank memo field while the transaction in the TO account would still have the special text in its Memo field.

Leo

Believe you can achieve your goal using QW's Tax Schedule Report. Set the tax attribute for the IRA account to: Transfers Out:1099-R Total IRA taxable distrib. With this setting, cash transfers from the IRA to a cash flow account will be reported as taxable income under the header "1099-R" in the tax report. Unfortunately, QW does not pick up cash transfers from an IRA to a regular investment account as I think it should. This has been true for 2005 thru 2008 versions - do not about 2009. There are a couple of work-arounds for the investment account problem. If the investment account has a linked checking account, transfers to the linked checking account are picked up as taxable income [just verified this by testing in my QW08]. The other option is to use an intermediate cash flow account; transfer from the IRA to the intermediate account and from there to the investment account. You can run the Tax Schedule Report for YTD or current year and you will see the individual distributions and the cumulative total for the period.

Thanks to you and JM for your comments. Actually it is not all that big a problem, I can get the transfers to the checking account from "Reports, Income and expense by Category" and the transfers which go to another investment account under "investment transactions by category". It is no terrible strain to add the two together. Thanks again.