Great explanation, John. Thank you. My farm business has a savings account and I put the money into a Fidelity account and I buy dividend-earning funds. Thus, equity investments are a real part of business assets.
It is too bad that Intuit is so stove-piped having features in one program, like Quicken, that are totally absent in a more "full-featured" program, like Quickbooks. Sad that Quickbooks Desktop doesn't have the same features of Quickbooks On-line, too.
I want to track all farm accounts in one program so I can print complete balance sheets and income statements regularly from one accounting program.
I think your recommendation to set up asset accounts for the mutual fund and ETFs is very logical. I'm going to try setting up subaccounts under a "Fidelity" asset account for the money market and each mutual fund, then use realized gains and losses when I sell, along with a dividend income account. I didn't like marking to market in Quicken anyway.
I don't know if I can set up subaccounts for assets in QB Pro, but I will find out shortly!! I just transitioned my accounting from Quicken to Quickbooks Pro, so I am learning what QB Pro can do, and not do.
In addition, many farmers have a commodity brokerage account, too, so once I reconcile the Fidelity account, I need to go through my brokerage transactions for agricultural commodity options and figure out how to model them in QB Pro.
Thanks for all the great advice to the community.
