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Split memo does not appear in receiving account

logkyles

Hello!

First of all, thanks for anyone who will take the time to help, it is really appreciated :)

I am trying to track a mortgage shared with my partner by splitting the transaction into several categories. It's a unique transaction so in order to track everything I have to use a few things

1 - I'm using 3 categories : Mortgage principal, Mortgage interest and City tax.
--- This is what I want to track, to know how much we've spent in principal (value of our house), interest (paid to the bank), and city tax (our bank takes directly on our account then pay for us).

So right now you might picture 3 categories and for each an amount, nothing more complicated... Well... this is where I have to be tricky

As I'm paying the mortgage on my own account, I need to have an other account for my partner where I add 50% of my payment for her to know how much she owes me.

2 - I'm using an account called "Balance" which receives half of each transaction from the bank through the split. So at this point we have something like this in the split of the bank transaction

xx/xx/2020 - House Principal - 500.00$
xx/xx/2020 - House Interest - 300.00$
xx/xx/2020 - City Taxes - 100.00$

xx/xx/2020 - Balance --- House Primary - 500.00$
xx/xx/2020 - Balance --- House Interest - 300.00$
xx/xx/2020 - Balance --- City Taxes - 100.00$

Total transaction 1800.00$

I can use the categories to track my part of the payment and I want to use the Memo in the "Balance" account to track the part my partner is paying. You can't do it directly from Quicken but exporting the "Balance" account into Excel works fine, I can create a filter per memo and get what I need.

Here's now the final problem I'm stuck with

In the "Balance" account instead of seing each category (Primary, Interest, City Taxes) I only see Primary with half the amount : 900$ (matching 500 + 300 + 100)

So now even when exporting the account into Excel to filter per Memo, I can't split the transaction.

Question :

Do I have to create an account per category I want to track so I can split it in the transaction using Account 1 - Primary ... Account 2 - Interest ... Account 3 - City Taxes. Which sounds painful.

Or is there a way to force Quicken to display in the receiving "Balance" account each split of a single transaction instead of grouping the final result as explained.

Thanks again for your help! :smile:

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splasher

I'll admit that I got lost about half way thru, but Tags came to mind.

Create two Tags (He, She) and apply them to the appropriate split lines. Then you could run reports based on the Tags to get the He or the She part of the expenditures.

Sherlock

First, to answer your question, you do not need to create an account per category. We can view the balance of any category.

I suspect you're making this more complicated than necessary. I suggest you create a manual loan account to track the mortgage principal balance and use the loan's payment reminder or memorized payee to enter the loan payments.

The City Taxes may be added to the loan payment: open the loan, select edit to the right of the payment amount at the top right and edit to the right of the other amount on the Loan Details window

To enter a loan payment: open the loan, press Ctrl + Shift + N and select Enter Loan Payment

There are a few ways to track your partner's contributions. I suggest using opposing categories in the loan payment set to the amount of your partner's expected contribution. When you receive their payment, you enter a deposit transaction using the category that tracks the amount they owe. For example, you could create a opposing categories called Partner owes and Partner contributed and in the other portion of the loan payment you have an entry for Partner owes that is the negative of the amount they're expected to pay and an entry for Partner contributed that is the amount they're expected to pay. When your partner pays you, you enter a deposit using Partner owes.

There a variety of ways to view category balances. One way is using an Itemized Categories report: select Reports > Spending > Itemized Categories

logkyles

Thanks for the quick answer. I wish I could just share a screenshot that would save many lines of explanation.

@splasher : the problem I see with Tags in our use is that without generating a report I can't see the current balance owed by my partner. In order to keep it "simple" I omitted that the "Balance" account is used for every transaction we share. She has one for the part I owe her and I have one for the part she owes me. In these 2 accounts we can see each transaction we've split and the memo states which category it refers to. This way when we pay back to our partner we can categorize our payment instead of just sending a global amount without specific category. This might be a non conventional way to use it.

@Sherlock : It does feel way too complicated to be honest, but coming from homemade excel accounting with exactly what I need, I'm trying to work around the limitation of Quicken compared to what I'm used to do. For the tracking of our House payment I'm actually using the methodology you're talking about. The "House Principal" is the debt we have and each payment I make goes into this account, but as I split my partner's part to go into "Balance", only half of the payment is accounted for until my partner pay her share using the same "House Principal" loan account. I see your point for the categories in order to track her contribution but this is causing the same problem than Splasher's solution, I can't see how much we owe each other without doing a report.

I suppose the main problem in my way of thinking here is to have a live "Balance" account instead of a "Balance category" which would track the same things but through report.

Sherlock

logkyles said:

Thanks for the quick answer. I wish I could just share a screenshot that would save many lines of explanation.

@splasher : the problem I see with Tags in our use is that without generating a report I can't see the current balance owed by my partner. In order to keep it "simple" I omitted that the "Balance" account is used for every transaction we share. She has one for the part I owe her and I have one for the part she owes me. In these 2 accounts we can see each transaction we've split and the memo states which category it refers to. This way when we pay back to our partner we can categorize our payment instead of just sending a global amount without specific category. This might be a non conventional way to use it.

@Sherlock : It does feel way too complicated to be honest, but coming from homemade excel accounting with exactly what I need, I'm trying to work around the limitation of Quicken compared to what I'm used to do. For the tracking of our House payment I'm actually using the methodology you're talking about. The "House Principal" is the debt we have and each payment I make goes into this account, but as I split my partner's part to go into "Balance", only half of the payment is accounted for until my partner pay her share using the same "House Principal" loan account. I see your point for the categories in order to track her contribution but this is causing the same problem than Splasher's solution, I can't see how much we owe each other without doing a report.

I suppose the main problem in my way of thinking here is to have a live "Balance" account instead of a "Balance category" which would track the same things but through report.

If you insist on using accounts instead of creating and using an Partner owes category and a Partner contributed category, create and use a Partner owes account and a Partner contributed account. The entries in the loan payment other can be a transfer to the Partner owes account and a transfer from the Partner contributed account. When your partner pays you, you enter a split transaction that deposits the payment and includes entries from transfer the amount to the Partner owes account and to the Partner contributed account.

Tom Young

When you make your checking Account entry your entry is along the following lines:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031128/uploads/editor/4n/5wbv3anaan2p.jpg

but all you're seeing over in the Balance Account is this:

so it looks like the detail behind that single entry is lost, but it's not lost, it's still sitting over in the checking Account, so customizing a report with only the checking Account "feeding" the report and the only "Category" the report lists out are transfers to the Balance Account, you get something like this:

So a suitably customized report using only the relevant Account or Accounts as the "source" and only transactions that are transfers to the Balance Account might suit for your situation.

Sherlock

Tom Young said:

When you make your checking Account entry you're entry is along the following lines:
but all you're seeing over in the Balance Account is this:
so it looks like the detail behind that single entry is lost, but it's not lost, it's still sitting over in the checking Account, so customizing a report with only the checking Account "feeding" the report and the only "Category" the report lists out are transfers to the Budget Account, you get something like this:
So a suitably customized report using only the relevant Account or Accounts as the "source" and only transactions that are transfers to the Budget Account might suit for your situation.

@Tom Young:

A problem with the approach is the payment account will not reconcile.

Tom Young

@Sherlock

Why wouldn't the payment account reconcile? The OP pays the $1,800 and sets up a receivable for the partner's half. What am I missing here?

Sherlock

Tom Young said:

@Sherlock
Why wouldn't the payment account reconcile? The OP pays the $1,800 and sets up a receivable for the partner's half. What am I missing here?

@Tom Young

The amount withdrawn from the payment account for the loan payment is reduced by the amount you transferred from the Balance account. If the checking account is to reconcile, there needs to be an opposing transfer or expense.

logkyles

@Tom Young : your solution of exporting sending accounts reports instead of the receiving "Balance" account is actually a really good one. We're using only 2 accounts each (checking and credit card) so we can easily handle the data in BigQuery/Excel to only extract payment made to "Balance" along with the Memo matching the original category. From there we can rebuild the total amount per category and use it to pay back each other using the correct category on the transaction.

@Sherlock : For the reconcile part, the mortgage account is indeed off by whatever amount is not yet paid by my partner. That's perfectly fine because we're not trying to track exactly how much debt there is (we have bank statements for that) but to make sure that when she pays back her part of the loan to me later on, we end up paying the same amount.

Now to be clear, it would still be great that Memo split details are passed on to the receiving account. It seams incorrect that the transaction exists in the sending one with several lines but everything is merged into one line in the receiving account. Especially as you totally can split it in the receiving account by hand so, in theory, you can manually maintain amounts and memo information but there's a lot of additional work reauired.

Tom Young

@Sherlock

There is no transfer from the Balance Account, it's a transfer to the Balance Account. You can see that the full $1,800 payment has been deducted from the Checking Account. Assuming the Balance Account is set up as an asset the entire entry is:

Debit (increase) Loan Payment: Principal Category       $500\
Debit (increase) Loan Payment: Interest Category          $300 -- $900
Debit (increase Loan Payment: Taxes Category              $100/
Debit (increase) Balance Account                                      $900
                                                                                        ---------
                                                                                         $1,800

The Balance Account went up by $900:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031128/uploads/editor/9w/f547ickytx0e.jpg

and that's the amount the partner owes.

Sherlock

Tom Young said:

@Sherlock
There is no transfer from the Balance Account, it's a transfer to the Balance Account. You can see that the full $1,800 payment has been deducted from the Checking Account. Assuming the Balance Account is set up as an asset the entire entry is:
Debit (increase) Loan Payment: Principal Category       $500\
Debit (increase) Loan Payment: Interest Category          $300 -- $900
Debit (increase Loan Payment: Taxes Category              $100/
Debit (increase) Balance Account                                      $900
                                                                                        ---------
                                                                                         $1,800
The Balance Account went up by $900:
and that's the amount the partner owes.

@Tom Young

Then the interest and/or principal portions of the payment must not be correct.

Tom Young

@Sherlock

From the look of things the OP was expensing all elements of the payment, ("I'm using 3 categories"), so I just followed along with that. They paid $1,800 and broke half of that into some Categories and the other half gets posted to a receivable Account. I figured that they were not tracking the loan in Quicken.

You were referring to the "payment account" as being unreconcilable and since there did not appear to be a loan Account I took that to mean "the account from which the payment is made", and that is the checking Account.

Are you saying that all along you've been referring to the (presumably nonexistent) loan Account?

Sherlock

Tom Young said:

@Sherlock
From the look of things the OP was expensing all elements of the payment, ("I'm using 3 categories"), so I just followed along with that. They paid $1,800 and broke half of that into some Categories and the other half gets posted to a receivable Account. I figured that they were not tracking the loan in Quicken.
You were referring to the "payment account" as being unreconcilable and since there did not appear to be a loan Account I took that to mean "the account from which the payment is made", and that is the checking Account.
Are you saying that all along you've been referring to the (presumably nonexistent) loan Account?

@Tom Young

I suppose so. You did join the thread late after multiple exchanges had already appeared in which the loan account was discussed.