Quicken and T-Bills recording

[calmloki]

So we're going round and round here. Started buying 6 month T-Bills on almost a weekly basis back in 10/22, shooting for a 6 month ladder. Currently have 20 T-bills and have moved them all to Fidelity and are buying new issues as they come up and saying "yes" to auto-roll.

Someone here shared an Excel spreadsheet and I'm using it (first time on Excel). So that's nice - I can see weighted days to maturity, total basis, stuff like that. Our problem is that my intent is to hold all the T-Bills to maturity, so while my simple self says "hey, twenty at $1000 par, value $20,000" my gal tracks our market value on everything on a daily basis. Which is actually more valid and reality based.

But we are having no luck recording that daily change in value in our 2006 version Quicken. We do all entries manually. I had been using the "stock" area and showing one entry for the bill purchase, then making a maturity dated entry with a deposit of the discounted amount. Something was very wrong with that, because we were getting thousands in the red as time went on. Now we're trying to use a register type Quicken account, and we just aren't staying in balance with Fidelity's reported balance.

We want to keep using our Quicken - there are a bunch of accounts and all our other expenditures and income streams there. We've massaged our classes and categories and have no desire to blow decades of entries and reports with an updated subscription new model Quicken. Just going wacky trying to figure out how to properly make the Quicken entries match the reality.

Halp!

 

[pb4uski]

I don't have t-bills personally so I don't have to deal with them on Quicken, but similar discounted bonds I just carry in Quicken at cost and they mark to market when I update prices.

I do manage a small portfolio of t-bills for our lake association and we use GnuCash for that. What I do in GnuCash is record the t-bill at cost and then record interest monthly by increasing the asset with an offset to interest income, so that at maturity the asset is equal to the maturity value.

So for example, if I buy a 3 month t-bill for $9,700 when I buy it I record $9,700 in t-bills and a $9,700 reduction to cash. Each month, a $100 increase in the asset and $100 increase in interest income. At maturity a $10,000 increase in cash and $10,000 decrease in the asset.

It's clunky but is sufficient for my needs.

 

[audreyh1]

T-Bills in Quicken. I use a stock symbol using the CUSIP for each plus description and update value occasionally from the brokerage account online. I recycle the stock symbol on autoroll updating the CUSIP. I don’t like adding more stock symbols ad infinitum.

So enter the buy, then at maturity enter interest income plus a sell for same price I bought. That way the interest income is tracked accurately in Quicken. My old version of Quicken never tracked bonds properly, especially not zero coupon, so I learned to do this long ago.

I also keep a spreadsheet of buys and maturity with interest. This gives the more complete historical picture plus better view of what’s maturing soon and due for autoroll. The brokerage positions view online clearly shows that last part.

 

[jollystomper]

My method of capturing the daily market price of my T-Bills uses a little programming. It works since mine are at Fidelity.

I download the "Positions" web page as a csv (comma separated values) file. I then run a program (python in this case) to extract the T-Bill values and prices into another csv file, in a format that Quicken import will accept. In Quicken I set the T-Bill symbol to match what my program creates (a string the includes the T-Bill CUSIP) so that the import maps the values properly.

I only do this once a week, on Fridays. I do not need to see the current market value more frequently than that. If I wanted to get them every day I would consider automating the process to include login to Fidelity and downloading the csv file, but I'm too lazy to pursue that right now .

 

[calmloki]

Thanks all - we're about to head south this Sunday at dawn, so will see if we can implement some of your bookkeeping methods next week (well, almost certainly not the OMG programming solution you espouse Jollystomper!).

We'll puzzle on it down in La Quinta next week - Thanks!

 

[JoeWras]

So enter the buy, then at maturity enter interest income plus a sell for same price I bought. That way the interest income is tracked accurately in Quicken. My old version of Quicken never tracked bonds properly, especially not zero coupon, so I learned to do this long ago.

This is what I do. Since I hold to maturity, I don't bother with the daily or weekly market value updates.

When I create the security, I am careful to input the following:
- Type: bond
- Maturity: date
- Call: date

There are some Quicken reporting tools that are very, very useful that you can use to sort by maturity date.

I say that not knowing if OP's 2006 has this info. The fixed income reporting and bond details have been updated and improved in the last 20 years.