Is my whole account set up wrong - Personal & three different Business

yonderdune

Should ALL my accounts for personal (with various CC's), business 1 (retail shop with separate bank account and CC's), business 2 (personal brand and merch within the shop with its own CCs and bank account) and business 3 (an Llc. for a rental property-with it's own cc and bank account) be in the same overall Q account? Meaning...that I would have access to, and see ALL these above items along the left side after log on?

Reason: Once in a while purchases are made from the incorrect account. Right now I have these entities in 4 separate files within Q. So for instance I open Business 1, work on it independently from the rest. Then I open business 2 and so on. But when I make a mistake with purchasing from the wrong account I've been manually entering it into the correct account, and deleting it from the wrong account...OR writing a check from the right account to the wrong account with memo. But if they were all in the same file, I could simply "reassign" the account from the drop down to rectify...correct? But since mine are all in separate files, this is not possible.

Would there be a way to merge them all? Is this a bad idea? Pros/Cons? Is this a Bookeeping 101 question and you're annoyed just reading this because it has nothing to do with Quicken, but more to do with my inept management skills?

I've somehow GOT to get through this to do taxes. Any suggestions welcome! Maybe there are some links to good (pedestrian) Quicken set up videos that fit my profile? TIA : )

NotACPA

The 1st question is: Does your shop file it's own tax return ... or is it reported on your personal IRS 1040?

The general principal(s) is that a Q data file should represent  a single tax entity AND that your accounts in Q should mirror the real world.

IF the shop files it's own tax return, it should be in a separate Q data file.

NotACPA

The 1st question is: Does your shop file it's own tax return ... or is it reported on your personal IRS 1040?

The general principal(s) is that a Q data file should represent  a single tax entity AND that your accounts in Q should mirror the real world.

IF the shop files it's own tax return, it should be in a separate Q data file.

yonderdune

NotACPA, thank you for the reply. That seems logical to keep them separated according to taxes. This is the first year the shop is open. I will be filing the shop and rental separately, not sure about the brand/art business. In the past I have filed the brand/creative (sole proprietorship) with my personal.

Assuming I keep them in 3 seperate Q accounts, what is the best practice for rectifying charges made to the wrong account? I suppose I could just delete the transaction from one account and add it to the correct account but this scares me a little. Seems I should have the original charge/transaction there to view if needed?

NotACPA

The sole proprietorship can usually be filed on Sched C of your IRS 1040 ... thus it would be proper to keep that business in your personal QDF.

IT does look like you'll need 3 data files.  If you make an error in  input, just delete it and re-enter in the proper data file.  Unfortunately, there's no Cut/Paste between files.

IF you download into your various accounts ...  an unmatched transaction (actually 2, one falsely input in one file and one not-matched in another file) will be a pretty good indicator of what SHOULD have happened.  I see no  need for a "historical record" of errors..