King Rat (gkr) wrote,
King Rat
gkr

Quicken 2005 sucks

Well, it doesn't really suck, but it doesn't handle exployee stock options very well. Here's what I can do:

  • I can enter a stock option grant. Upon doing so, Quicken adds entries on each and every vesting date and on expiration. None of these entries can be edited.
  • I can exercise stock options.
  • I can re-price my stock options

Here's the things I cannot do:

  • Quit the company. Because I cannot modify any of these entries, premature expiration of stock options is not possible.
  • Have my company's stock split. So although my options double on a split, I can't do anything about it.
  • Have my company get acquired by another company. When my options in company A are converted into options in company B, I can't enter that.
  • Enter the vesting schedule manually. Quicken allows me to enter the total vesting period, the initial vest percentage, the initial vest date, and the frequency of vesting thereafter. However, it miscalculated the number of shares that were to vest on some of the dates, likely due to rounding errors. You can't have .5 of a share vest, so do you round up or down? Quicken chose one way. My employer chose another. And my employer wins.

I am finding this very irritating, because three of those four things have happened to me. Also, I have no good way to enter restricted stock unit grants either. Essentially these are stock options with a strike price of $0. They are treated differently tax-wise, but their value reflects that. However, the minimum strike price is 1¢. That's not too far off either, but it's still irritating.

I also just looked for a nice export feature because if this irritates me too much, it'd be nice to export all this out into a nice X.M.L. file that could be read in by other financial management programs. But no easy luck so far. If the program has this feature, it's buried.

I spent time last fall looking for other programs that would do what I wanted, but couldn't find any really. Might have to look again though.

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