December 11, 2007
Quicken Premier problems with ESPP if only the Grant End Date Price is used.
This year I decided to try and get more organized with my finances - especially with regards to investments which I had previously tracked in Excel. I went to Costco and bought Quicken Premier 2008 which handles ESPP (Employee Stock Purchase Plans). Why not Microsoft Money? Well, because I had been a long time Quicken for Mac user, so I’m just used to it - inertia and all that.
(FWIW, I was never able to successfully migrate my Mac Quicken data to Windows Quicken, but that’s another post.)
Unfortunately, it appears that Quicken Premier 2008 is incompatible with Microsoft’s ESPP. You see, Microsoft simply gives a discount on the Grant Ending Date price, whereas many (most?) other companies give a discount on the lower of the Grant Beginning Date or Grant Ending Date price.
The problem is that Quicken validates the data for the more common scenario. Here’s a hypothetical entry into Quicken’s ESPP Wizard:
Observe that the Price/Share (26.52) is 10% less than the Price/Share of the Grant End Date (29.47). If you click Done, this is what happens:
Drat!
I sure wish they would eliminate this check, but I could see why it’s important.
In the meantime, I’m not sure how to workaround this. I’m pretty sure there’s no combination of data that I can enter here to trick the wizard into closing and keep the integrity of my data.
I guess I can’t use this ESPP feature, which is unfortunate as this was a major selling point for me.
Any one from Intuit care to take a stab at fixing this in an upcoming release please?
Oh, and if you’re in the mood to fix a bug, could you please fix this:
It’s pretty frustrating that the year column is always truncated, and that the columns are not adjustable. I have to mouse over to get tool tips to appear.
Add to your Toolbar
8 Comments to “Quicken Premier problems with ESPP if only the Grant End Date Price is used.”
December 11th, 2007 at 10:27 am
Ouch! I designed and implemented the ESPP (and ESOG) features for Quicken about ten years ago. At the time I used to laugh that Money couldn’t handle the Intuit ESOG plan.
Looks like they’ve mucked with the dialogs a little bit since then. (I still use Quicken 2000 myself, and I haven’t run into this problem with my MSFT ESPP.)
My memory of the tax rules is very fuzzy (and blurred with details of employee stock options). I seem to recall there being specific IRS rules that may be motivating this check. Something about computing the “bargain element” which is always W-2 income even if you hold the shares long enough to get some of the gain to count as long-term.
Then again, I don’t remember implementing this specific check. (And I wouldn’t have misspelled “whichever” as two words.)
I think if you enter the ending price for both dates, the dialog will accept it, and the calculations should be correct. With our simplistic MSFT plan, I don’t think the bargain element comes into play. They withhold money to cover that before buying the shares. (THIS IS NOT TAX ADVICE.)
If you do this, the price history may pick up your lie on the grant date, but you can manually correct the price history. Even if you leave it wrong, it will have very little effect on anything, since this is just the ESPP-specific tracking security.
I’ll ping some buddies over at Intuit to see if they have better insight into this problem.
December 11th, 2007 at 11:55 am
Maybe you should switch to Microsoft Money?
December 11th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
What is an MS employee doing using Quicken?
December 11th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
Don’t listen to Jim. He’s not my (only) friend over there!
December 11th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
The question is actually answered in the first paragraph. A shorter version would be “laziness”.
December 12th, 2007 at 11:28 pm
My solution to this problem? I stopped doing ESPP.
December 14th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
I will see if there is anything we can do next year about it.
February 24th, 2008 at 7:53 am
Have you tried entering the share price as $26.523 (.9*29.47)? I’m using an older version of quicken and in situations like this I usually have the it adjust the share price so that everything works out (under the assumption that the # of shares and total cost is more important than the .003/share difference)
Leave a Reply