How to show transfers to IRA, college savings, etc. as expenses in income & expense report

LWDC

I would like to show transfers to my IRA, college savings accounts, certain other long term savings accounts as expenses in a monthly income and expense report because I want to see how much I have left over each month after those deposits. How can I do this? Right now, they either show as income and expenses or they don't show at all.

Thanks.

Sherlock

If the IRA, college savings accounts, certain other long term savings accounts are excluded from the report transfers TO these accounts from the accounts included in the report will appear as Expenses in the default Income and Expense reports.  By default, the IRA account should be unchecked on the Accounts tab and Exclude internal selected in the Transfers pull-down menu on the Advanced tab: open the report and press Alt + C.

Jim_Harman

One side effect of this that I have struggled with over the years is that if you exclude an account from a report so that transfers to or from it will appear as expenses or income, then deposits or withdrawals directly to or from that account will NOT be included in the report.

So for example if you want a report to show transfers from an investment account as "income" you may not want to withdraw or write checks directly from that account to cover expenses that you also want to show in the report. Also if the transfers are showing as income then dividends earned in that account will not show as income. I think you would not want the dividends to show as income anyway, because that would be double counting.

There may be a way to work around this with further report customization, or you can transfer the money to a spending account first, either by actually making the transfers or by entering them in Quicken even though they did not happen in real life.