how do you categorize improvements on rental property

Unknown

I have categorized our kitchen remodel as Home Improvements and associated it with our rental property.  It does not export correctly for importing into TurboTax as an asset to be depreciated over years.  It exports as an expense.  How do you set this up correctly?

Vetta

This should have been entered as a Transfer into the asset account set up for the rental unit.

Capital improvements add to the basis of an asset. They are not an expense in the usual sense of the word. When you created a category you told Quicken (and then TurboTax) that this was an expense instead of a depreciable item. I would change all "Home Improvement" entries to Transfers and then delete the Home Improvements category completely. You might also enter something like "kitchen update" in the memo field just to jog your memory in the future.

Hope that helps.

Unknown

Perfect!!  Thank you very much!  I knew it needed to be a depreciable item...I just didn't know how to make that happen in Quicken.  I'll give this a try.  Because checks were written for the improvements, it imported in as a checkbook entry.  Just didn't know how to "code" it to make it work seamlessly with Turbo Tax.  Appreciate your assistance

J_Mike

Jan said:

Perfect!!  Thank you very much!  I knew it needed to be a depreciable item...I just didn't know how to make that happen in Quicken.  I'll give this a try.  Because checks were written for the improvements, it imported in as a checkbook entry.  Just didn't know how to "code" it to make it work seamlessly with Turbo Tax.  Appreciate your assistance

Jan

Quicken (any version) does not handle depreciation. Thus, there is no way to "...to make it work seamlessly with Turbo Tax.".

The best you can do is track depreciable expenditures in Quicken - and then you manually enter these expenditures into the various TTax dialogs and/or worksheets.

Barbara Acosta

Hmmm. If you use the above method, then it makes it harder to export into TT. I've also tried creating a "depreciation" category, which does export well, but then it doesn't account for the increase in the asset value. This is very annoying.