Scottrade and dividends.

[ddmk6]

Hello,

I am trying to get things in order for year end. I have the personal edition of FM. I use the Scottrade OFX server for my updates. When I ran a cap gains report I noticed that no dividends showed up in the report. They show up in the cash account but do not show up in the cap gains report. Plus they show up in the cash account as a purchase, how do I change them to show as a dividend? I have tried searching the topics, not having much luck.

Thanks,

Kenny

[Mark]

Hi Kenny,

Dividends do not show up in a Capital Gains report. Capital Gains are shares you sold, showing you the gain or loss on these sold shares. If you run a Distribution Summary report you will see your dividends. Dividends are recorded in the investment that received the dividend, and then the proceeds are deposited into your default cash account, which is why you're seeing a purchase into the cash account. To see the actual dividend transactions, open up the investment that received the dividend in the Data Register (Edit / All Data...) and set the "Data Type" drop-down to "Distributions (all)", and you'll see all your distributions, which will include any dividend type of distributions.

[ddmk6]

Thanks Mark,

Is there a report specifically for year end tax reports? I don't see anything in the reports section. Would be nice to have a one click report that shows all reportable income etc.

[Mark]

Hi Kenny,

Typically you need 2 reports for taxes: Capital Gains and Distribution Summary.

[ddmk6]

Thanks again Mark,

Is there a way to set up a custom report that will grab all reportable income for a tax report? Cap gains, distributions and interest?

I'm still learning FM, there is quite a bit of info to wade through. Some of it doesn't quite make sense. If I run a cap gains report it seems to pull up all of my earnings, but when I run a performance report the numbers don't add up in the % gain section. I have recorded the puts that I have sold, the ones that expired with no award as suggested by adding a transaction to purchase the number of shares at a zero value. In the performance report the gain shows up but the percent gain does not, it says N/A? Not sure why this is.

Thanks for your help,

Kenny

[Mark]

Hi Kenny,

You cannot get your Capital Gain "transactions" in a Custom report, only in a Capital Gains report. You can get distributions of the type Short/Medium/Long Term Capital Gains in a Custom report. For example, see the "ST Cap Gain distributions (between)" field.

The Capital Gains report lists one line per sell transaction. It is showing some shares you sold, what you paid for them, when you bought them, how long you owned them, and your gain/loss on that pair of transactions. A distribution of type Short/Medium/Long Term Capital Gain is a distribution you received of this type, typically for a mutual fund.

The Custom report does not list by "transaction", it can list by "Investment", "Symbol", etc, but it doesn't list by transaction like the Capital Gains report does.

The %Gain column in a Portfolio Performance report is for the time period of that report, and includes both realized and unrealized gain/losses. See "Help / Help on Report..." from within that report for the equation being used, and an explanation. If you have a starting or ending value of $0 for the report period the %Gain will be N/A as the equation isn't meaningful when there is no value at the endpoints. If you still have questions on a particular case, please let me know all the numbers on that row of the report, and I can try to help explain.

[cricketbunty]

Hello

How do I create a report which shows Capital Gains and Dividends together? I had booked redemptions last year but these dont get pulled into the Distribution Summary report - it is only pulling in Dividends and the Capital Gains report shows only Capital Gains. It will be nice to see total "income" in a single report. Thanks.

[Mark]

Hi cricketbunty,

The Capital Gain report lists by transaction, whereas the Distribution Summary report lists by a variety of things (investment, asset type, etc), but does not list by transaction. If you want to see a summary of your realized gains and distributions on per-investment basis you can create a Custom report with the fields:

Tax basis, realized gain, Assigned Method (between)
Total distributions (between)

[cricketbunty]

Thanks Mark