Advice on Best Practices
**This is not a support issue** I looking for advice on best practices to use with Moneydance.
Here in Canada we have Guaranteed Investment Certificates (GIC). They seem to fit the MD CD security type model. You buy a GIC at an amount, and they return the amount at the term. However, they also pay interest depending how they are set up. Some pay monthly or yearly straight interest. Some pay compound.
I am not looking to create an automatic transaction, but rather what category or action to give that interest. I have two choices: Call it a DIV action or use the Bank Register with a some category like “Interest Returned”.
Which would be best?
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1 Posted by dwg on 03 May, 2024 10:25 PM
To be honest it doesn't matter, either way works, just slightly differently in terms of how you enter them, it comes down to how you prefer to enter the transactions and also how you want them to look in the register. a Div action looks as you would expect, a Bank register entered Int transaction in the Investment register shows as an Xfr transaction.
In both cases you have a Category you assign the transaction, that would be the same category in either case
For this it really comes down to where you want to create that category in your Chart of Accounts/Categories.
In my case I have interest from various accounts, term deposits etc and I want them reported on an account by account basis so underneath my Interest category I have sub-categories for interest from each account.
Easiest way is to set up a quick new data file and try both methods out and use which you prefer.
2 Posted by DrgnMastr on 04 May, 2024 01:28 AM
Thanks, dwg, I like that concept of Interest:<account>. I will investigate it moving forward.
I had a long chat with my financial advisor on this and several other action codes that were being used on my account, and we came up with a course of action. I just finished about four hours of getting my dataset consistent given that these GICs were a subset of a larger investment account.
Thanks again.
3 Posted by dwg on 04 May, 2024 02:01 AM
It can be surprising how flexible Moneydance is when you get into the software. This is somewhat attributable to the fact that you interact directly in the registers rather than say like Quicken via entry wizards and date entry screens.
So you can do a lot provided you follow accounting rules.
4 Posted by Stuart Beesley ... on 04 May, 2024 06:18 AM
There’s one other reason for Div / MiscIn over using Xfr. The former links it to the security so that you know where the income came from, especially for the Investment Performance report (etc)
If they are just Xfr, it could be a random txn appearing from any security (or not) within the investment account
5 Posted by DrgnMastr on 04 May, 2024 10:41 AM
Thank you dwg and Stuart for the great advice. Reporting has improved greatly with the changes that I made.
System closed this discussion on 03 Aug, 2024 10:50 AM.