Income on Spending Tab Does Not Include Investment Income

JLP1976

In the income section of the Spending Tab (Quicken 2018 Windows Version), investment income is not showing up.  It appears that any income entries in investment accounts that show Deposit in the action column are picked up, but anything that would be entered via the Enter transactions: Inc- Income (Div, Int, etc.) drop-down are not picked up.  In other words, anything in the action column that is not a deposit is not picked up.  I was able to get a LT cap gains transaction to show when I entered it as a cash transaction (deposit) and used _LT CapGnDst at the the category.  

Jim_Harman

I suspect that this is by design, because often people do not think of investment income or capital gains as "spendable." This is the Spending tab, after all.

It would certainly be nice, however, if this tab were more customizable, so that you could choose which Categories to include in addition to choosing accounts. This would let you include investment income and also transfers from investment accounts to spending accounts as income. As a retiree I don't have a paycheck, but for spending purposes I like to think of transfers from investing to banking accounts as income.

But there may be complications with expanding what is included in Income on this tab. For example, would you want to include reinvested dividends? reinvested capital gains? These are important for tax purposes, but probably not for spending.

One alternative is to click on the Reports button at the top right of this tab and look at the income and Expense by Category report, which is fully customizable.

JLP1976

I agree that this tab would be much improved with customizing capabilities.  You make a good point about reinvested income.  At first read, I thought this easily handled by not including re-investments.  Then I realized that some people collect dividends and capital gains as cash for later re-investment.  So, since there are many ways to view income and spending, this tool would be much more effective and useful if it were much more flexible.