How to reimburse myself for business expenses paid with personal accounts

Clemont

Previously, I used Quicken for personal finances and Quickbooks for business finances.  Now I'm trying to use Quicken H&B for both but it's not working out very well.

I often use my personal accounts to pay business expenses.  Each month I write up an expense report and transfer the total from business checking to personal checking.  I need to categorize the business expenses.  I can't find a way to record a single transfer in the personal account while tracking the category of each expense in my business account.  Please help!

Tom Young

Quicken Home and Business is designed for business activity that gets reported on Schedule C or Schedule E as part of you personal Form 1040.  It just doesn't work very well if you are trying to account for a business that's separate and distinct from "you", i.e., a sub-S Corp or a C-Corp.

EVERYTHING inside that Quicken file is considered "yours"; it's you personal activity and your business activity all bundled together.  That's exactly how the IRS looks at it to.  So transferring money from your "business" checking account to your "personal" checking account is simply moving money from one pocket to another; it's not an "expense" it's not an "income", it's just a transfer.

You have two ways of going here.

1. Leave things as they are and when you pay business expenses from your personal checking account, simply code them in Quicken, appropriately, as business expenses.  Then, when you move money from the business checking account to your personal checking account, that's a simple transfer, no different from moving money from your savings account to checking.
2. Mimic what you were doing when your were using Quickbooks.  That is, put all business activity in a file that accounts ONLY for business activity.  That way you can still submit expense reports "to the business".   In the business file you'd record those as various expenses, with a credit to a liability Account.  When you moved money out of the business Account the offset would zero out that liability Account.  The accounting in your own file would be exactly the opposite; an increase in the checking Account that zero's out the receivable Account.