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Donation Income Shows as Expense in Report [edited]

MaryBorn

I am the treasurer for a non-profit organization and use Quicken 2018 Home, Business and Rental. All the categories and reports were set up by the user before me. We receive donations that are deposited as income. When I run the report to show income and expense by category....my donations show up in red under expenses. Most times the donations are added in a split screen as donations for a deposit, along with other deposit money we received. I have looked at the category Donation...it is set up as income. What am i doing wrong?

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Frankx

Hi @MaryBorn,

It is difficult to know exactly what you are seeing, but it seems like your "Donation Income" is incorrectly being posted to an "expense" category, rather than an "income" category. This makes senses if you are seeing figures "in red under expenses".

To get this recorded correctly, first you'll need to see if the "user before you" setup an "income category". To find this out - go to: "Tools" > "Category List" then click on "Business Income" on the left. You should see a category called "Donations", or "Donation Income" or something similar.

If there is nothing like that, you should add such a category by:
1) Clicking on the "New Category" button in the upper right;
2) Fill in the information as shown in the Snip shown below:
3) When the entries are complete Click the "Save" button.

Next, you will need to recategorize all those donation transactions that were incorrectly posted to an expense category and change them to the "income category" that you just setup (or that you found when you did the search above.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions and also how this goes.

Frankx

MaryBorn

Frankx,
I looked under Tools, Category List, Personal Income (Not Business). Found Donations. it is listed as....Donation, Income, Donation, Personal Income and then Schedule A Cash Charity Contribution. We also receive memorials...that is listed the same as Donations, but does not have the Schedule A Cash Charity Contribution. Memorials also show up on the Report under Income as Income. How do I remove the Schedule..... to see if that makes a difference as to how and where it is listed in the Report?
thanks,
Mary

MaryBorn

Frankx,
Does it matter if I run a report from the left side of the report menu..to do a comparison by category? If I use the report from the right side, and just run a report for donations, it is black.

Jim_Harman

By "left side of the report menu" do you mean the menu that is shown when you go to Reports > Reports and Graphs Center?

In that menu, Quicken's built-in reports are on the left and reports that have been customized and saved by the user are on the right. Customized reports may may include only selected accounts and/or categories. You can click on the gear at the top right of the report to see what is included.

Frankx

Hi again @MaryBorn,

It sounds like the person who setup the Quicken file may not have done things according to "Hoyle", at least in my view.

The categories you list above "Donation, Income, Donation, Personal Income and then Schedule A Cash Charity Contribution" really don't make sense for a non-profit organization. The reasons are: 1) these are the records for a charitable organization and therefore in Quicken you should be using the "business" categories - not personal categories - which all of the ones you mention are; 2) the references in Quicken category names to "Schedule A" are references to an IRS form that people file with their Form 1040, so those are clearly not right; and 3) as I implied above, the reporting will never be correct if you continue to record income in expense categories.

I would suggest that you setup new categories so that going forward, the records and related reports will be accurate, complete, and easily understood by whomever may need to review and work with them going forward. Right now, they are not either of those things.

On running reports - the left side shows the "standard, pre-formatted reports" whereas the right side shows reports that the user(s) has/have saved, and these may have been customized by prior user(s). You can run reports from either side, based on your needs. I suspect the reason that report "run from the right side" is blank could relate to the time frame of he report, or the fact that new entries made after the last "financial person" left did not use the same categories that the prior person did.

Frankx

maryb

Frank’s,
I agree with you, because I get very frustrated working with the way Quicken is set up now. If I set up new categories the correct way, what happens to the entries in the past? I would not be able to compare one year to another year? Also, going back and correct all the entries would be a nightmare. There could be as many as 10 deposits a month, not counting how many donations there are in each deposit.

Chris_QPW

If this ends up being a simple "swap of categories" then another approach other than creating new categories, is just to change the ones they used.

There isn't anything stopping you from completely changing an existing category.
You can change its name, whether it is an income or expense and the tax line.
By changing the existing category all the transactions associated with it will change too.

Be sure to do a backup just in case if you try this.

Chris_QPW

P.S. the change from personal include/expense to a business expense happen when you change the tax line to a schedule C/business tax line.

Frankx

maryb said:

If I set up new categories the correct way, what happens to the entries in the past? I would not be able to compare one year to another year? Also, going back and correct all the entries would be a nightmare.

@MaryBorn

I think we agree that your predecessor misclassified income to an expense category (which clearly is wrong) AND that you inherited problems that should be corrected.

There is a way to correct at least the "income that was recorded as an expense" (which was what Chris referred to) because Quicken will allow you to change the category originally assigned to a new income category that you can easily set up. And there is a "Recategorize" feature in Quicken that will let you change the incorrect expense category entries to the new income category.

Here are a couple of Snips - the first one shows how the P&L looks today with negative (income) numbers in the Expenses part of the report. The second one shows what the Recategorize feature looks like.

-- - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Let me know if you have any followups.

Frankx