How to include A Quicken account transfer in a Quicken Report ‘Income’ grouping?

DJW

My goal is to have a single Income report which show all unique sources of 'Income' grouped together and all Expenses 'Estimated tax payments' grouped together.
I have this today.
The problem is I now have taxable Income from 401k withdrawals in multiple unique Quicken accounts. I am struggling to have these transfers show up in a Grouped Income report as a unique line item (currently defined by Category).

My Scenario:
This approach evolved from the original release of Quicken, new features may have been missed as they have been added over the years…

For many years I have had 2 sources of Income. 1099 and Rental (From multiple sources). Both 1099 and Rental Income are Invoiced within Quicken Business.
All Income comes in as a Quicken Invoice payment. These credits are Categorized in the ‘Invoice Payment’ and posted as a transfer to a blind Quicken ‘Income’ account.
Within these blind ‘Income’ accounts the Estimated Tax are then debited out with a Category (Estimated Tax payments), or transferred out to the appropriate spending account.

This results in a Report (Sorted by Category) that shows all sources grouped by
- ‘Income’ (With Unique categories)
- ‘Expenses’ (With Unique categories)
- ‘Transfers’. (ancillary, informational not really useful)
Good to Go.

Today:
I have two additional sources of Income. SSI Payments and taxable 401k withdrawals.
SSI Payments are handled in a similar way as above. The difference is the use of an ‘Income Reminder’ to post the blind account credit with a unique 'Category' vs The Quicken Invoice payment method which assigns the unique category. The reason this approach works is the use of ‘Income Reminders’ with a repeatable amount.
SSI Payments are Good to Go.

The Problem:
The problem is with 401k withdrawals (Taxable Income). I have multiple 401k Investment Accounts within Quicken.

I would like to have the taxable 401k withdrawals show up as a credit in the ‘Income’ grouping of my report under a unique category, similar to the other sources of income.

To do this I think I need to assign a Category to a Quicken Account transfer similar to what Quicken does in the ‘Invoice Payment’.

Quicken does not appear to allow this. Ref: https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7594359/i-want-to-categorize-transfers-yet-still-acknowledge-the-transfer-between-accounts.

Yet this seems to be the cleanest approach. Ref: Quicken ‘Invoice Payment’ approach.

I can manually match categorize Debits (non transfer) from the Investment accounts to Categorized Credits in the Spending accounts (independent of a transfer) to achieve my complete Income report, but it seem like an antiquated approach prone to error.

Does anyone know of a better approach to this ‘Taxable 401k income transfer’ action, that will result in an ‘Income’ report that subcategorizes all the unique sources of Income?

(Ideally with minimal refactoring…)

Thanks in advance

Tom Young

I'm having a bit of difficulty following along with your accounting scheme but I take it you'd like to have all these various distributions from multiple 401(k) Accounts to show up as one line item on your custom report? 

One way of doing this is to establish a clearing Account between the various 401(k)s and the checking Account where the deposits ultimately appear.  So each distribution would be recorded as:

Debit (increase) Cash Clearing Account      $XXX
Credit (decrease) 401(k) Account "A"          $XXX

Debit (increase) Regular Checking Account $XXX
Credit (decrease) Cash Clearing Account     $XXX

That would leave the Cash Clearing Account at $0.  Then customize your report to not use the Cash Clearing Account as an Account that "feeds" information to the report but does show up as a "Category" in your report, like this:

In this example two different retirement Accounts made distributions but all that shows up in the report is the sum of those two distributions passed out of the clearing Account.