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MD has helped with my Taxation Reporting

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dwg

26 Sep, 2013 10:01 PM

G'day,

I've been as forthcoming as anyone with what I view as deficiencies in MoneyDance :) This however is one thing that has turned out pretty well.

I've just working on my annual taxation return, as we all know MD can generate reports that can help based on your normal transactions, so things like Interest received are just there, with additional categories defined I have been able to add franked and unfranked dividends as well as franking credits to the reports, and of course MD generates capital gains reports.

This puts in basically on a par with what Quicken does.

However I also have stapled securities and managed fund investments where any amounts received cannot be categorized in themselves, and in some cases no funds are received in any case. For taxation purposes you receive an annual report that has the splits, well after the time when you received any funds. I've been able to pass transactions through the various accounts that categorizes the amounts from the report, these then appear in the customized Taxation reports I have memorized.

With quicken I would have to have a separate spreadsheet that I used to consolidate all the information!

The report is not perfect, that is why I suggested somewhere that report writing capabilities would be a nice to have, consider what we need to do here in Australia with capital gains:

Capital gains can be either on the Discount, Indexed or Other methods. Any capital losses from the current or previous years have to be against the gross amount of these. Any remaining amount under the discount method are only tax on 50% of their gain. You need report writing capability to manipulate these numbers appropriately (nope not interested in moving the data to a spreadsheet I'm looking at have the PFM software handle this). It would also be good for calculated capital gains to also be able to automatically be defined to go to the correct category in the report (I'm currently using a dummy transaction to force it).

The issues I've faced are mainly in entering data correctly, it is much too easy to make a mistake when categorizing the entries – that is why I suggested an applet were you enter investment income type transactions into defined boxes and the software creates the various entries based on user defined criteria (Quicken is doing something like this with dividend and trust distributions where you select the investment & date then just fill in the $$$s into the correct boxes and it posts the needed transactions) – I've had to fix up quite a few transactions that I did not select categories correctly.

The report however does give me the basic data I need to completely the tax return and I have it all in the one place, which is a decided improvement.

Really what I have suggested above is for easy of use and improved capability, my real need is for some extra investment transaction types. MD is deficient in this area in my opinion and the current range of transactions do not accurately handle all situations (capital returns both ways, adding and removing shares with no value etc)

I'm glad I moved from Quicken, but the lack of Investment transactions is annoying at best and in the long run could force another move if something better comes along. I consider being able to correctly record transactions to be fundamental and today this cannot be done in some instances.

Thanks for listening.

Des

1. 1 Posted by Scott Meehan on 07 Oct, 2013 03:46 PM

   

   Hi Des,

   Thanks for the detailed message and I'm sorry for our slow response! What types of investment transactions are you looking for?

   Scott Meehan
   Moneydance Support

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2. 2 Posted by dwg on 08 Oct, 2013 08:53 PM

   

   Hi Scott,

   There are really two types of transactions that are needed in the basic Australian context, the need for them come up reasonably often.

   The first one is a Return of Capital transaction type, however it needs to be in both directions, i,e, capital you get back and thus reduces the cost basis of you shares as well as additional capital you need to put in that increases the cost base, this you use with shares they have been sold on an installment basis, but are tradeable at the current value.

   The second is the ability to add & remove shares without a buy or sell transaction. The common use of this is with stock splits or reverse stock splits where you have a partial number of shares left over, companies here generally round off the number of share sometimes upwards sometimes downwards.

   Other software also uses the add/remove "shares" to track superannuation balances that you want to track (where you have no unit price, but have a changing total value, the method is that you just set a fixed unit price of $1 with a changing number of "shares").

   I've been fudging add/remove through zero value buys and sells but this completely stuffs up the ability to use lot matching. I've been using buy/sells of 0 shares with a value to fudge capital returns, but again lot matching is stuffed up.

   Hope I've explained it clearly enough.

   Des

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3. 3 Posted by Scott Meehan on 09 Oct, 2013 02:57 PM

   

   Hi Des,

   Thanks for the further explanation! I've filed a ticket in our ticketing system with your request and descriptions, so the developers will be looking into it.

   Please let us know if we can be of further assistance!

   Scott Meehan
   Moneydance Support

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4. 4 Posted by dwg on 11 Nov, 2013 08:42 AM

   

   Shareholders in a relatively major company in Australia (Wesfarmers) in the last week approved two proposals at the AGM that highlights the need for these transaction capabilities. I though I would include them here for reference, I've paraphrased them slightly to make it clearer.

   1. "The share capital of the company will be consolidated through the conversion of one ordinary share in the company into 0.9876 Ordinary shares in the company and that any resulting fractions of a share be rounded up to the next whole number of shares"

   2. "the share capital of the company to be reduced by approximately $579 million, such reduction of capital to be effected by the company paying to each registered holder the amount of $0.50 per share"

   These types are transactions are not that unusual in this country at least and also consolidation and capital return occurring at the same time is also not that unusual

   Thanks

   Des

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5. 5 Posted by Scott Meehan on 11 Nov, 2013 05:35 PM

   

   Hi Des,

   Thanks for the additional information! I've added this to the ticket.

   Scott Meehan
   Moneydance Support

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6. System closed this discussion on 31 Mar, 2015 04:05 PM.