basic question on income reporting

[Bruce]

Hi, I'm evaluating the professional version. Quick question to help me understand both the mechanics of being a user and the philosophy behind the architect's decisions (as understanding the architect's philosophy will help me understand my perception of benefits / issues I'm not experienced enough to know about yet). Of course I'm writing this based on just ~20 hours of use and reading, but I've focused solely on account set-up and this Income Report, for those 20 hours, so if hopefully your answer is "you got it all wrong" and you can set me straight.

Income report: Seems straight forward enough ... dividends, interest, c.g. distributions, etc. I've downloaded several accounts from Schwab that have types of income and ... the Income Report is zero.

I've found in the manual that I need to highlight each asset, click properties, and manually enter the income tab. So I picked one stock, went back to G-Finance to get the current distribution per share and dates, and hand-entered that in. Now the report reflects one stock's worth of divs as "income".

And for that stock, it will be out of date shortly as they do annual div increases.

Why doesn't the software recognize this from Yahoo's price data or from the account's register download, particularly in the PRO version where we can have more than 10,000 assets? The register shows the correct "transaction" type (except cash ... Schwab labeled interest on cash as "interest income" from 12/14 - 3/15, then called it "purchase"). Not really digging the idea of updating the properties tab every time a stock chances div-rates.

Why isn't interest earned on cash and cash-equivalents included in income (they don't earn dividends and they are not bonds (fixed-sized payments)).

Like I said above, just getting in to this and trying to understand the philosophy as much as any one particular task. Thanks.

[Mark]

Hi Bruce,

Thanks for trying Fund Manager. This issue does cause some confusion. The "Income Schedule" report/graph are for showing future expected income, based on the "Investment Properties... / Income" settings. You don't have to enter those properties, but if you want to project your future income, you can. Your actual distributions (dividends/interest/etc) are downloaded from your broker and are recorded as transactions. Those are what you're viewing in the Data Register. To view the sum of these, use a "Distribution Summary" report or a Custom report instead. The Distribution Summary report shows all your distributions (dividends/interest/etc) for any time period you want. Interest income is just one type of distribution. You can see all of them in this Distribution Summary report.

[Bruce]

Thanks for the quick reply. So, for someone reading this later (and to make sure I got it right):

I went in to the properties / income tab and changed all the distribution dates to 2017. Then in the Income Schedule report I asked for all of 2017. It then showed the dividends for that one stock (the only one I hand entered 2017 dividends for).

I can't test it (it'd be really hard to fake the data given it's December) but I suspect if I had all that data entered by the end of January, then in ... say February ... I could use the Income Schedule set for "current year" and get all of 2017's "scheduled" income.

That's going to be a lot of looking-up and hand-entering data (I have a lot of stocks counting my theoretical portfolios), so I guess Plan B is to do what I've always done: Look at past data for dividend increases (for example "5%") and just estimate next year will be 1.05 times whatever the previous year was.

I'm still struggling with interest earned, even in the Distribution Summary report. I think the issue is how the software interprets what Schwab gave it. Here's what I mean. Dividends show
in the Investment Transaction report in two lines: Line 1 says XYZ did a "div" of $30, and Line 2 says "Buy" "Cash" at $1/sh for $30. But interest (say, $3) on the cash account just shows up on one line as a "Buy" "Cash" at $1/sh for $3.

So as an experiment I added a transaction against the Cash asset that is a "distribution" of "investment income" that is "reinvested" ($3 value x 3 shares). That transaction now shows up in the Distribution Summary report. It also incremented the account cash value. Should I conclude that I should force all downloaded bank-interest transactions from one-line "purchase" transactions to one-line "distribution" transactions of interest income?

Thanks.

[Mark]

Hi Bruce,

On the Income tab issue, note that those dates don't have a year. They are just month and day. Those dates will apply for all years. It can be a lot of work to update all those for many stocks. You can use this however you think makes sense for you. It can be more useful for bond investors.

Yes, the interest in a cash account should be recorded as a Reinvested Distribution of type Interest Income (not just a purchase). You could make it a distributed distribution plus a purchase, or just a single reinvested distribution. These are equivalent.