Introducing Investment Transactions -- Share your feedback here!

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.

@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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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