Help file on bond purchases & accrued interest

[JeanneMarie]

I suggest the Help file could use a couple of tweaks:

The "New Investment Dialog" page says that I'll be prompted for interest and accrued interest info. But this does not happen when manually creating a new bond investment from the File menu.

The "Recording Bond Transactions" page could be more complete and helpful if it were clearer that the option to enter accrued interest is NOT available when creating a new investment. It only becomes available when entering a new TRANSACTION and if the investment’s properties have been set up properly. Therefore after creating an investment manually, with basic purchase info, you need to (a) double check those properties and (b) enter the negative Interest Income transaction manually or delete and re-create the opening entry manually.

A caveat: Alas, I don't do this every day so I cannot recall whether/when FM may have taken care of this when auto-creating an investment in the past. It did not auto-create a recent bond purchase. (And I'm not sure I want to blame FM for this. Lately, I don't think Merrill Lynch has been sending all transactions when expected. I'm just not able to troubleshoot this systematically/effectively since I'm not that big a customer on Wall St. or here.)

Thanks for listening and, of course, for correcting me if/when I've gone wrong,
Jeanne

[Mark]

Hi Jeanne,

You should be able to enter accrued interest in the "New Investment" dialog. Make sure you have selected "Bond" as the "Investment Type", and then the "Accrued Interest" edit box should be displayed in the "Opening Data:" section, right below the "Date".

[JeanneMarie]

Uh oh. I probably changed the investment types a long time ago. When I choose Bond-Corp. (the original ?? "bond" ??), you are correct that I have lots more fields to complete, including those that I have been missing.

But having created Bond-muni and Bond-gov. and Bond-agency... they are not in this dialog box.

So can I add this functionality to that dialog for those investment types?

I can live with this. Or possibly, I can always create corporate bonds and then tweak the investment type maybe?

But perhaps the Help file should contain some warnings about messing with certain categories of labels?

[Mark]

Hi JeanneMarie,

Yes, I see how that could be confusing. Thanks for the feedback. Only the original investment types for Treasury Bill and Bond will show this accrued interest option. This doesn't change if you edit the labels, and there is no option for you to customize which investment types will show accrued interest in the New Investment dialog. Yes, you could use "Bond" originally, enter your accrued interest, and change the investment type to something else, but you would also need to check your transaction entry preference and income style properties:

The option to enter accrued interest is available when entering a new transaction and your investment is set to a transaction entry preference of "commission fees" and the income style is set to "Bond Interest".

The above is from the documentation on how to enter bond transactions.

[JeanneMarie]

Okay, thanks. Since I'm not a heavy-hitter bond trader, I can certainly manage this little "problem" once a year or so, now that I know what to expect and why it's working one way or other.

Cheers!