new budget

gslanger10

We are beginning to use the budget feature of quickent. Here's the problem: My wife and I split some payments, a car payment for example. If she transfers $200 to me and categorizes it as, for example, "car payment" and then I make a $400 car payment and categorize it as "car payment," won't the budget show $600 in that category when we have "really" spent only $400? Is there any way to force the budget to monitor only selected accounts, or is there anyway to avoid this problem?

UKR

Assuming that you are recording everything in one Quicken data file ...

If you pay the full amount of the car payment from one of your accounts, then that's what you should categorize. (Actually, that should be more like a transfer from your checking account to your car loan account)

The transfer of funds from your wife to you should just simply be that ... a transfer of funds from accounts A to B, without additional categorization.

jacobs

@gslanger10 What UKR has suggested above is exactly mimicking in Quicken what you say you're doing in real life: (1) your wife transfers money to you, and (2) you pay the full bill. So in Quicken, you'd want to record (1) the transfer from her to you, and (2) your payment of the bill. How would you expect it to be simpler? (I'm asking just to make sure we're not misunderstanding what you're doing.)

Now, if you want to be able to report on how much of the loan your wife paid for versus what you paid for, there are ways to do that, although they may make it more complicated. One way is to create a split on your loan payment transaction, and use a Tag for you and a Tag for your wife on the two split lines; that way you'd have a loan payment of $400, but any report in which you show tags, you'd see that $200 was for you and $200 was for your wife. Alternatively, if you don't use tags, you could still have two split lines on your payment, with two Categories or Sub-Categories -- "Car Payment-Self" and "Car Payment-Wife", so you'd see these two expenses separately on a report.

(And not to complicate things, but are you just tracking the car payment as a simple expense, or do you have a liability account for the loan, where each payment is split between principal -- a transfer to the loan/liability -- and interest expense? If so, then you'd need to further split the principal and interest portions between yourself and your wife -- e.g. 4 splits for the transaction.)

UKR

Assuming that you are recording everything in one Quicken data file ...

If you pay the full amount of the car payment from one of your accounts, then that's what you should categorize. (Actually, that should be more like a transfer from your checking account to your car loan account)

The transfer of funds from your wife to you should just simply be that ... a transfer of funds from accounts A to B, without additional categorization.

gslanger10

Thanks. That was what I was afraid would be the case. It seems like it should be simpler than this, but we can make this work. gs

jacobs

@gslanger10 What UKR has suggested above is exactly mimicking in Quicken what you say you're doing in real life: (1) your wife transfers money to you, and (2) you pay the full bill. So in Quicken, you'd want to record (1) the transfer from her to you, and (2) your payment of the bill. How would you expect it to be simpler? (I'm asking just to make sure we're not misunderstanding what you're doing.)

Now, if you want to be able to report on how much of the loan your wife paid for versus what you paid for, there are ways to do that, although they may make it more complicated. One way is to create a split on your loan payment transaction, and use a Tag for you and a Tag for your wife on the two split lines; that way you'd have a loan payment of $400, but any report in which you show tags, you'd see that $200 was for you and $200 was for your wife. Alternatively, if you don't use tags, you could still have two split lines on your payment, with two Categories or Sub-Categories -- "Car Payment-Self" and "Car Payment-Wife", so you'd see these two expenses separately on a report.

(And not to complicate things, but are you just tracking the car payment as a simple expense, or do you have a liability account for the loan, where each payment is split between principal -- a transfer to the loan/liability -- and interest expense? If so, then you'd need to further split the principal and interest portions between yourself and your wife -- e.g. 4 splits for the transaction.)