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Categorized Transfers in Q Mac
Quicken Community
Employee mod
Allow an expenditure category to be set for transfers. It's possible to enter data this way, but the transfer function overrides the category. This is important for budgeting. My use case is an IRA contribution. That is both a transfer (checking to brokerage) and a budget category (IRA Contribution), since it's going from liquid to illiquid. Also important for tracking physical assets, e.g., transferring X dollars from checking into the asset value of a car on purchase, but also tracking the payment (and loss of liquid cash) in the budget.
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So there needs to be a way to budget for transfers, selectively. If you've been using Quicken Mac for a while, you may be aware that a similar need existed with reports, and over the past year, they have added the ability to selectively include or exclude transfers from reports. The product manager indicated that was a necessary first step to allowing budgets to similarly include or exclude certain transfers. The developers understand that users want this functionality and why, and we've been told it's under development was they tackle a number of significant feature requests for the budget area of the program.
Unfortunately, we don't yet know when this functionality will appear, just that they are working on it.
(This is one of the longest-running, and most highly voted, feature requests. If you care to read it, the existing feature request is here; you can note that it is one of the rare Idea topics marked as "Planned" in the blue box under the initial post.)
Tax - related reports will correctly show these transactions based on tax line items.
FYI - in QMac, contributions/distributions to/from retirement accounts are recorded by assigning a category to the transfer. The categories carry the appropriate tax line assignments.
The QMac system has an advantage over the QWin system in that one can make both pre-tax and after-tax contributions via transfers to a given retirement account - just set the appropriate category for the transfer.
Am curious as to what modifications they (Quicken) have in mind to handle these transactions as they move away from the ability to assign categories to transfers in QMac.
Quicken user since 1991
Now running Quicken Windows Subscription, Home & Business
Retired "Certified Information Systems Auditor" & Bank Audit VP
Bad news: you can't do it currently. In fact, being able to budget for certain transfers, like loan payments or savings, is one of the feature requests with the highest number of votes on this forum.
Good news: the product manager for Quicken Mac acknowledged the need a long time ago, and said they were committed to bringing this functionality to the program. They started work on this more than a year ago, but apparently had to do some deep re-writing of the code for the budget part of the program in order to make this possible.
We don't know when this functionality will be released. It's been a long time coming, so the hope is sooner rather than later, but we just don't know. There are some signs one could look at optimistically: earlier this year, they added the ability to selectively include/exclude transfer from reports, so it's likely that a similar mechanism will be used for budgets. More recently, they added the ability to select which accounts to use for budgets. This was a feature request unto itself, but it's also likely a building block that was needed in order to be able to select which transfers to include in a budget.