How can I total a Category for Investments? (edited)

neon45

I need to total Ordinary Dividends for the year to date. I have selected the Net Income Report, the applicable accounts, the Year to Date and the Ordinary Dividend Category.

I get all the Transactions, but, no totals.

The same goes for Interest Paid. Without the totals Simplifi is useless for estimating taxable incomes. This was dirt simple in MINT.

DannyB

Hi @neon45

Yeah, using Q-Simplifi for tax reporting purposes is not Q-Simplifi's strongpoint. As a month-to-month income/expense planning and tracking tool it's not well suited for the kind of in-depth accounting required for detailed tax related issues.

I was a long time user of Quicken Classic and I had access to the level of detail you looking for but Quicken Classic is built for much more in-depth accounting if you are willing to do the th detailed work required for that level of accounting. I'm not at all familiar with Mint but it sounds like it was more akin to Quicken Classic than Q-Simplifi and thus comparisons between Mint and Q-Simplifi are less valuable than a comparison between Mint and Quicken Classic would be.

It's been a few years since I needed an accounting package that could give those kinds of reports and hadn't really used them for a few years before that since, in the end, all that information was readily available on my various account statements and end-of-year tax reporting documents.

However, there may be a user who does know how to get at the info you are looking for and hopefully will chime in on this or perhaps @Coach Natalie will have some insights.

neon45

Thanks for the response. Yeah, as a replacement for MINT, it's about a 5 out of 10. It's amazing that the program can't do something as basic as add a column of numbers. I don't even need a "report". Just a sum of a column.

I would be using Quicken classic if there was a way to convert a CSV file to their annoying propitiatory QFX file. I found this site from a Quicken blog; http://www.quicknperlwiz.com/ , but, good grief….

RockLee

I feel your pain Neon, ex-Minter myself. Isn't the "Total net income" in the upper left the total? If you perform a further search in "Search transaction" then it should show a count with a total of the matching transactions.

neon45

Thanks RockLee… This is such a frustrating piece of software, let alone Intuit, who's stock is closing in on an all time high.

All I wanted to do was add up taxable div & interest to ship off to my accountant to figure out an estimated tax amount.

As of today I can't even do that because QS has dumped all my Investment transactions that occurred before August 2023! I even tried reloading fresh CSV files from Mint.

I can get a report, with a total, for a category from any bank or savings account and can export it. But QS frustrates us even more by not letting us export a simple brokerage report. I'm totally floored why we can download a bank but not a broker report.

RobWilk

@neon45 If you didn't know, Intuit is not the company behind Quicken products. They used to be a while back.

neon45

RobWilk…. Thank you.. one of the gazillion details in life that slipped by that never meant anything in the past :)

"Quicken is a personal finance management application originally developed and offered by Intuit, Inc. Intuit sold Quicken to H.I.G. Capital in 2016, and H.I.G. sold Quicken to Aquiline Capital Partners in 2021. Quicken runs on Windows and Macintosh systems, though the data is incompatible between the two versions. "

Now I know why Mint was shut down… Thanks

RockLee

The scary thing is that I've tried several other major web based financial products, and Simplifi is one of the better ones for reporting (best of the ones I tried), even though I agree, it's not as good as Mint's Trends, maybe someday.

With that said, I think you can do what you are asking, get a total, for the year, of given a category.. Except that it sounds like you are missing transaction before August. You could try and import the dividend an interest transactions from Mint, into Simplifi, I know it's a PITA, but it is what it is.

Also, You should get your 1099-DIV and 1099-INT forms from your financial institution(s) which states your income from these sources. for me I would prefer to use these instead of secondary financial software.

brokenchord

I wanted to do something similar to get year to date interest and dividends for savings and money market accounts and ended up creating a new Watchlist using categories (You could also use tags). On the watchlist page, it displays the Year to Date total by default.

Not sure if that would work for investments but may be worth looking into.

neon45

Thanks for the idea brokenchord… That sounds doable. Just have to rebuild the wheel of categories that QS didn't import correctly and get the last 3 to 13 years of transactions :(

Update: I got all my transactions!!! At least for now :)

I did an experiment to find Ordinary Dividends over a selected time period. It seems to work. Investments » Select Account » Transactions » Select Category / Security (if needed) and then, Check the Date box. Then close all the years / months that you don't want included.

Worked for me… ymmv :)