Introducing Investment Transactions -- Share your feedback here!

pkp

Coming here to +1 a lot of what other people have said. There are huge issues with the way dividends are treated right now.

• Most of my dividends are being treated as Payment/Deposit and Uncategorized, which means they end up in the Spending/Income reports.
• I understand that Dividends are intentionally not treated as Income right now in the app. While I disagree with this approach and would desire more customizability, why is "Dividend Income" an Income category for regular transactions then? It sends a mixed message.
• I have no idea whether to try to put all my dividends as Payment/Deposit and be able to classify them as regular income or whether I should put them as Income Dividend under Action (and not have them in the spending/income reports). Right now, it's like half/half and from what I can tell, anything I do to try to change any transactions might get reverted in the next download anyway. And there's no visibility into how going one way or another affects everything else. If I classify them as Payment/Deposit, does that screw up all the Investment Performance indicators?

BillM

Adding comments from other post as suggested by Quicken Natalie. Also similar noted by previous posts…

I have various accounts at Fidelity and when transactions are downloaded into Simplifi, the action is always Payment/Deposit, Security/Payee is description of the transaction, and Description / Category is always Uncategorized.

However, all of this information is present in the transaction detail. # of shares and price is available (as it correctly identifies these details in Quicken Premier) but not present in Simplifi. Copying data from Quicken Premier to Simplifi would be time consuming and not sure there is value in doing this.

Why does Simplifi not correctly populate these fields with the information downloaded as it does in Quicken Premier?

I am assessing Simplify currently and find overall easy to use but falls short in several areas such as:

• limited sub-category creation.
• inability to setup recurring transaction with splits
• automatically populating investment transaction detail
• no built-in calculator (helpful when splitting transactions)
• auto calculation of split transactions only go 3 deep
• linking of recurring transactions seldom work

Hopefully many of these issues will be resolved/improved over time.

The ability to use on our iPad (via Microsoft Edge) is useful and has been dependable thus far is certainly a plus as Quicken Premier does not provide this ability (mobile app has corrupted data many times so do not use)

Will use until subscription renewal and decide whether to keep or not.

ajbopp

@BillM I'm not sure what you mean by "limited sub-category creation." Is there an improvement to one or all of the methods available to create sub-categories you'd like to see?

"Linking of recurring transactions seldom work" - They work about 95% of the time for me. Fails rarely enough that it's not an issue, and is generally understandable why (linking an Amazon to the wrong Amazon recurring transaction transaction, for example - with as many Amazon transactions as I have in a month, I wouldn't really expect 100% accuracy from any app like Simplifi here).

Philk

@BillM I'm with @ajbopp regarding limited subcategory. Do you desire having a category whose parent is a subcategory?

For example: Automobile > Energy > Supercharger

> Home Charger

ajbopp

@Philk I...sincerely hope that's not what they desire. What a nightmare that would be.

Of course if it were implemented I wouldn't have to use it, I could just limit myself to two levels of categories anyway. But I'd hate to see the elegance of the app in general decline by such an implementation.

BillM

@ajbopp @Philk

Limited sub-categories - What I mean by this is currently there is only 1 sub-category allowed for each parent category. I would like a minimum of 2 sub-categories. Example:

1. Insurance
   1. Auto
      1. Car
      2. Truck
      3. RV
   2. Home
   3. Health
      1. Medical
      2. etc…..

Could I use tags? Sure, but I would end up with many individual tags where the above example provides a split for reports as well as a summary for the parent and each sub-category. Tag reports would not provide this comprehensive detail.

ajbopp

Hmm...I would be in favor of doing it a little less complex.

1. Auto
   1. Insurance
   2. Car Payment
   3. Gasoline
2. Health
   1. Health Insurance
   2. Co-pay
   3. etc

That will give you the detail I think you're looking for. It will tell you everything you are looking for in each category, and if you really want to see all the different types of insurances in one report, a moment of fiddling with filters will get you there.

UrsulaA

Income interest from the Schwab cash sweep option comes down as personal income for me.

I added my vote to existing feature requests to export investment transactions and import same to Simplifi.

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/5964/ability-to-import-export-investment-transactions-edited

Can we delete a holding added by mistake? I had to add Cash-Schwab to link the interest to the cash option. I also created some holding by mistake that does not have a ticker.

BillM

@ajbopp

Thanks for the feedback but not quite. I want all insurance costs summarized then break down. With your suggestion, I would still need to review multiple parent categories to arrive at a total cost summary for insurance costs.

UrsulaA

I found a bug on investment transactions. The same $0.49 cash interest payment for Schwab was reported 4 times in my IRA.

Simplifi

Schwab

I will delete the duplicate interest in Simplifi.

Also, Simplifi tags the interest income received from Schwab's cash as Personal Income, which I am manually correcting for now.

UrsulaA

Can we add the ability to filter investment transactions by their action instead of by the categories used for other accounts?

I want to track how much income I get from the investment accounts. For now, I tag income transactions with a div int tag.

Flyfisher

What’s the deal with the security name saying MET -credit? I use the dropdown to rename it to just MET, hit update, nothing happens. Also, I’m hoping the next iteration of investments section starts to include some reports - capital gains, maybe even some tax schedules?

TodayTomorrow

None of the transactions or holdings are downloading from the brokerage company. I use other money management software and the transactions and holdings from that brokerage download. Any idea?

UrsulaA

Good thing about investment transactions: The investment income adds up to what my broker, Schwab, has. I tagged Income Interest as Int and Income Dividend as Div, filtered by tag, and had my annual investment income displayed for me. This is neat.

UrsulaA

I like that I can view my investment transactions in mobile as an early access user by clicking on balances and then selecting the appropriate account.

neon45

In Transactions….

When my broker reports a regular Dividend for stock XXXX…

Simplifi dutifully reports the Security / Payee.. excellent~

But… when, exactly the same report comes through with a Qualified Divided… the Security / Payee does NOT show the security.

I have log into my brokerage accounts and reconcile them to the accounts and match dates to Dividend Amounts and manually enter the Security.

UrsulaA

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/23313#Comment_23313

I noticed that dividends get downloaded again if I select the action/type to equal Payment/Deposit and the category to equal Dividend Income.

Also, interest sometimes come in duplicated as action/type = Payment/Deposit and category = Personal Income.

This occurs with the Schwab API connection.

I like categorizing dividends and interest as Payment/Deposit with the corresponding transaction category for me to have the option to include these in reports if I choose to.

DannyB

Personally, taking the time to keep track of investment transactions has so little reward (for me the reward is so close to zero there is no discernible distinction) I simply don’t bother with it and set up my investment accounts as manual. I spent some time adding all my holdings and every couple of months do a review and update any changes except for the account our monthly draw comes out of, that’s a monthly update.

This gives me all the info I need in Simplifi, and only for net worth purposes.

Still, for someone who is actively managing their investments as part of thier income generation there is certainly a need for a robust investment module. But there again, if I was an active trader for income purposes, I think I would use an app specifically designed for that.

UrsulaA

You made good points @DannyB. I like viewing my dividend income on occassion and it is nice to be able to add it to reports if I want to. I also like viewing investment accounts as part of my net worth. I have at least 20 years till I retire/slow down to freelance. I do not see myself not doing any work at all after retiring, my brain needs exercise.

Other than that, I use my broker for more details on the accounts including cost basis and performance.

Troy

sharing from a discussion I was having on investment transaction categorization and how I use income from investments since I have no payroll income:

**************

First and foremost 100% of my income comes from dividends, interest and capital gains as required. Getting these coded historical (which was the origination of this issue) and each day is key for me to see cash flow, income and for the spending plan to work I believe. I haven’t started on that setup yet. 

Without this I managed to get a report to work somewhat and I have recategorized them all today. However I am not sure i found them all. 

In doing so I also noticed my CMA where all my bill payments comes from has a ton of uncategorized transactions. I began working on them today but there are so many and different categories I’m not sure I will be able to complete this for ~2 years of data without better filtering. 

Next is understanding why they cam in uncategorized and fixing the root cause. Starting to watch thr new transactions to see if they categorize correctly or if I need to develop rules to assist. I am hoping the changes I made are learned from by the application. 

When you don’t have a paycheck and use a CMA (cash Mgt account) at your brokerage for bill pay it appears the investment accounts need what I assume is th functionality of a traditional bank account which I don’t have.

I hope that helps. Mostly over the first time data load bump now so any insights on getting th app to learn to add rules for these scenarios would be very helpful. 

As an fyi - once I started th correction nothing showed up and I realized that all my accounts from Fidelity where these accounts are we flagged to not include in reporting or spend planning. I assume this is an assumption you guys have made about how you expected investment accounts to be used. I hope these scenarios help you to understand other ways some of us use our “investment” accounts. 

Happy to assist in any way.

BillM

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/26519#Comment_26519

I wonder if you have tried Fidelity Full view? I have been using that in parallel to Simplifi and believe its functionality is similar if one is looking for something simple (+there is no cost to use it). They are in process of making updates to full view and hopefully do not remove some of the capability it currently has, however.

Oleksander

I also notice duplicate transactions appear whenever I change the action.

I use Acorns and Robinhood, and I'm not sure if it's different for other brokerages but the transactions are… to be blunt, very bad. The action for everything is automatically Payment/Deposit (except for dividends, which are categorized correctly). In no cases, not even for dividends, is the security automatically set, even very intuitive ones. A Disney buy is set as Payment/Deposit with payee "Disney Market Buy", but when switching the action to "buy", "Disney Market Buy" becomes the description and the security is left blank. Worse, if I choose "Reinvest Dividend" that as the action, the transaction/dividend price is set to 0. The only information left is the date and the description.

Also, all market buys through Acorns that are not dividend reinvestments don't show up at all. Sometimes transactions will have the descriptions of other transactions on the same date. It's effectively a list of dates and (sometimes) costs of 75% of my transactions, some with incorrect descriptions, and everything else needs to be entered manually.

SharpDome

I experience the same behavior as Oleksander, although all of my investments are with Vanguard.

bigforblue

For manually updated investment portfolios, it appears when you update the portfolio share numbers (manually add shares), this gets reflected on the performance tab as a "gain/performance %" bump in both TWR & IRR when in reality this is not an "investment gain" but rather new money moving in.

The TWR graph says it "does not take into account the impact of cash moving in and out of an account" (but this appears to only apply to linked accounts?). Also as noted, "Investment Transactions do not interact with your Investments Portfolio or Account Balances" https://help.simplifimoney.com/en/articles/6540220-managing-investment-transactions so there appears to be no way to label/document/tag this "new money moving in" manually to distinguish it from investment gains.

I wish I could see my monthly/yearly performance of the actual investments excluding this new money added. I believe would either require a new feature or change to allow the Manually Added Investment Transactions to interact with the Manual Investment Portfolios. For example, if you add a manual transaction (entering the cost of shares, number of shares, date of shares etc) it then reflects that change in the Manual Portfolio Share # and Value & is somehow counted as a "cash moving in" transfer behind the scenes. Or have TWR or a new graph simply subtract the value of the Investment Transaction from the Performance % to cancel out this "new money moving in" performance percentage bump.

AllanT

We need to be able to export Investment Transactions.

swiggity

Putting my feedback in for these transactions - I exported thousands of them from Mint and they are all messed up…which isn't that bad, I understand the difficulty in getting all investment transactions into the same format. However, since there is no bulk edit for transactions I would have to spend a massive amount of time editing each one by hand. Would love to see a bulk action edit