And not in a good way.

I've been trying to get my 401(k) transactions into either Quicken or MS Money, so I can do some rough analysis on it. It shouldn't be that hard.

Both programs characterize a 401(k) account as a simple investment account: having both a cash side, and an investments side. When you buy a stock, the money necessary for the purchase comes from the cash side. It makes perfect sense for brokerage accounts, because that's how they work.

But 401(k) accounts take all their money from your paycheck, and it's often not even mentioned as showing up in the account, just the purchases are. When I download the past 9 years worth of transactions from Fidelity (2 years at a time, because that's all they support), they provide only the investment purchases... which makes it look like all those purchases came from the cash side, and put the cash side of the account into a big fat hole.

The solution? Well, I can manually enter 9 years worth of paycheck contributions. Which I did. (On a yearly basis.)

Except that that's not enough. Every single dividend also generated a blob of cash (not recorded) and a share purchase (recorded) for the exact same amount. So I have to add all those manually too.

So, fine, whatever, if I just have Quicken list out all the dividend transactions, I can print them and manually re-enter them as cash additions. Except that Quicken 2006 has a bug, and can't separate those transactions from the rest. Leaving me to scroll through the list and copy them one-by-one to new entries at the bottom.

Augh.

Intuit's web site has useful help topics like "How do I enter a transaction?" and "What great offers do you have for me?" but doesn't answer the useful questions like "Why does Quicken 2006 Mac have almost nothing changed since Quicken 2002 Mac?" and "Who are the losers who work on this thing?"

Tags: money, whining