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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rkral who wrote (48267)	4/14/2002 9:20:04 PM
From: David Colvin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

OT .. Been planning to get Quicken for years ... ... and still haven't done it. Does it show gains (losses) on an annualized basis? (And of course, take the fractional year into account?) Absolutely! As you know, for the purposes of calculating gains/losses, the IRS only cares what you buy and sell between 12:00 midnight on Dec 31, 20XX and 12:00 midnight on Dec 31 of the following year. The "default" report setting of Quicken investments reports is for the current year (showing gains/ only in the current year). However, you can create (and memorize) Quicken reports covering ANY time frame that you wish. When using TurboTax in conjunction with Quicken for, say, preparing your 2001 tax return......only transactions recorded as completed in 2001 will be transferred from Quicken to TurboTax in determining and calculating your 2001 tax return. Quicken is extremely intuitive to use, is very flexible and is also very "forgiving" if you change your mind (such as allowing for the deletion of a "user-created" category for which you have recorded transactions but you decide later on that you don't need or want it). Quicken also readily allows for the re-naming of "user-created" categories with the click of a mouse button, after which Quicken will go back through your entire file and find ALL transactions that were recorded against the old category and re-associate those transactions with the new category. This takes about 1/2 of a second. Here's another thing that Quicken does. You can set up a portfolio in Quicken, then download closing prices (with highs and lows for the day) right into your portfolio from Quicken's web site. However, the downloads won't generally work for "over the counter" or "pink sheet" stocks. You can always then go back and load prices for such stocks by hand though. Personally, I print out a list of closing prices on all stocks, mutual funds and major indexes I'm interested in via the reports function of my Fidelity Investments on-line trading software called Fox + on every Saturday morning and the morning after the last trading day of each month. Then I HAND LOAD all closing prices (good enough for me) as of every Friday or as of the last trading day of a week AND for the LAST TRADING DAY of every month into my portfolio. Once I'm done updating Quicken, I then check the balance (TO THE PENNY) in Quicken vs. the balance shown for my accounts in my Fox + on-line trading software. If there are ANY discrepancies (sometimes I miss a transaction, such as a dividend) I go back and find it and fix it in Quicken! Doing all this on a weekly basis, along with frequent cross-checking of account balances, prevents me from having to face preparing my federal taxes from a big pile of paper (transaction confirmations)......spending hours on end adding and checking before using the information on my federal tax return. It just takes a little time/discipline every week to prevent HOURS of tearing my hair out trying to find a $3.50 discrepancy in April of the following year. Dave p.s. Can you tell that I like Quicken?