Workarounds for lack of investment features?
Please improve investment transaction handling. MD users have been asking for years to allow merges, transfers, etc...normal things that happen with investment accounts every day.
My wife and I are contributing to Traditional IRAs with Fidelity and then converting the contributions to Roth. That involves four separate accounts that each download transactions from Fidelity. Every month when I contribute/convert, both Traditional IRAs download the monthly contribution and then the monthly conversion out. Both Roth IRAs download the conversion in. Since MD doesn't allow merging, I can't merge the convert out transactions with the corresponding convert in transactions, which means I have incorrect balances if I correctly code the transactions (ie, correctly show Traditional xfer to Roth and Roth xfer from Traditional).
So far I've been employing workarounds, which another user eloquently pointed out are for software that is no longer in development. I haven't settled on one, but these seem to be my choices:
1) Download everything, wait a day or more, delete one side of the transfer, hope it doesn't re-download (or use toolbox to help it not re-download). [I just successfully did this with November's contribution]
2) If the transaction keeps downloading, zero out one side so that it won't download again but also won't affect balances negatively.
3) Transfer out to a dummy category such as Investment Expense and then Xfer in from a dummy category such as Investment Income. This isn't ideal because the dummy category is rendered useless by the extraneous transactions
4) Don't track the intermediate transfer in MD and tie the inbound conversion to the bank account, making it look like the $ goes straight there. Monitor the intermediate transactions on the Fidelity website. I'd prefer to be able to track the transactions from all of the accounts, just in case there's other activity in the intermediate accounts while they temporarily hold funds.
What workaround is everyone else using to overcome the "no merge" limitation?
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1 Posted by avp2 on 18 Nov, 2021 04:30 PM
Seems like you use the same WA's I do, especially #'s 2 & 3. However, I think the merge function is really kind of a separate, and yes badly needed, function that would probably eliminate #2, but not #3. I think #3 is made necessary by the dual balanced accounting model and will always be needed. I use a dummy account to show a "RMA for this year" budget bar and Ratio report for instance - merging would not change that process/need.
System closed this discussion on 17 Feb, 2022 04:40 PM.