Community Discussion: How Do I Add A Tag To A Brokerage Account?

[John Pollard]

Community Discussion: How Do I Add A Tag To A Brokerage Account?

Found at: https://tinyurl.com/2dn3wv7j

[Last Community Post: May 1, 2023 @ 5:01PM]


Some transactions in Quicken investment accounts can be tagged; some cannot.
The general rule is that transactions whose "Category" field is accessible (whose category field can be modified by the user), can have a Tag.

The method for tagging any Quicken transactions that do not have a separate Tag field is to append the Tag to the Category, with a forward slash separator, thus: Category/Tag.

Most of the investment transactions that can be Tagged are cash type transactions - for example, all those transactions in the Quicken investment account "Enter Transactions" dialog group "Cash transactions" (namely: Write Check, Deposit, Withdraw, Online Payment).

Also Miscellaneous Income transactions and Miscellaneous Expense transactions can be tagged. I don't think Transfer transactions would be applicable to an income/expense report, but they too can be Tagged.

Dividend Income, Interest Income, Short-term capital gain, Mid-term capital gain and Long-term capital gain transactions cannot be tagged: Quicken assigns its own Category to those transactions and does not make their Category field accessible. A workaround for that is to record those transaction types as "Miscellaneous Income" and assign whatever Category is desired (which can be the same Category that Quicken would have used) with the appropriate Tag appended.

So. for example, an "Dividend Income" transaction can be recorded as a "Miscellaneous Income" transaction with a Category of _DivInc ... with any desired Tag appended to the Category. Or the user could create their own Dividend Income category and use that instead.

One investment transaction type poses a possible problem: Reinvestments. You cannot tag reinvestment transactions; so to tag their income, I believe you would have to record a dividend reinvestment as two transactions: a Miscellaneous Income transaction (to mimic a Dividend transaction) and a Buy transaction. I don't recall the details, but I seem to recall that in some places Quicken treats a Div/Buy combination differently than a ReinvDiv.

[I have noticed, in at least some Quicken releases, that after a tag has been applied to some investment transactions, that Tag may not be visible in the "Enter transaction" dialog ... but it is still part of the transaction.
That can be verified by viewing the transaction in a Quicken report that displays categories/tags.]

[John Pollard]

Subsequent posts in the Community discussion have pointed out something I missed in my original post here: namely, that Quicken Sold transactions can generate capital gains, and Sold transactions can't be tagged: any capital gains are automatically categorized by Quicken to the category, _RlzdGain.

While at first glance that seems to present an insurmountable hurdle to the original poster's desire, I believe there is a workaround.

The user can enter a MiscExp transaction to offset the capital gain amount; then enter a MiscInc transaction to reinstate the capital gain - and MiscInc transactions CAN be tagged.

[The same result can be accomplished by entering a Withdraw transaction to remove the capital gains, and a Deposit transaction to re-enter the capital gains with a tag. That could be done with 2 Reminders, or one $0.00 net amount split transaction Reminder: one split line offsetting the original capital gains amount, the second split line re-entering the capital gains amount with the desired tag. The advantage of the Reminder approach is simplified transaction entry; the disadvantage may be the loss of the security name in the resulting transaction(s).]

[I personally I find the op's idea a lot of work for very little gain. But for those who share the op's wishes and who are willing to put in the extra effort, it appears the op's goal may be attainable.]

[Last Community Post: May 2, 2023 @ 1:31 PM]