Default Balance Sheet report is wrong

Chris_B

If you select the Business tab, then click the reports drop down, then select Balance Sheet, the resulting report includes all personal accounts.  This is wrong, and should not include personal items in a Business report.

I understand that someone may want to know their personal balance sheet, but the Business tab, and Business Balance Sheet report is not the place to get this information.  This report should be ONLY business items.

The Profit & Loss report from this same location is correctly only including business accounts, so I know it can be done.

PLEASE fix this report so I don't have to keep a saved report, or edit this report every time I want to see my Balance Sheet.

Thank you.

Tom Young

This entry

https://www.quicken.com/support/how-create-business-reports

doesn't mention clicking on the Business tab first, it seems to start up at the "Reports" menu and then selecting "Business."

I don't have the Business product so I'm not really sure what the correct path is.

Chris_B

Tom Young said:

This entry

https://www.quicken.com/support/how-create-business-reports

doesn't mention clicking on the Business tab first, it seems to start up at the "Reports" menu and then selecting "Business."

I don't have the Business product so I'm not really sure what the correct path is.

How to launch the Balance Sheet report doesn't matter actually.  This BUSINESS report includes personal accounts, and it absolutely should not.

None of the BUSINESS reports should include personal accounts, by default.  Yes, it can be edited to remove them, but that's a waste of time, and has to be done EVERY TIME one creates these reports; often quarterly.

Please get these BUSINESS reports corrected to include ONLY business accounts by default.

Thanks

Tom Young

"Please get these BUSINESS reports corrected to include ONLY business accounts by default."

Sorry, there's no way I can do what you ask since I'm only another Quicken user, not "Official Quicken Support."

Since I don't have the business product I'm a bit at sea here.  I've frequently seen references to making sure that "business" Categories are properly linked to Schedule C in order to get Spending reports (I'm guessing "P&L" reports in Business Quicken) to come out properly, but I wouldn't think that sort of thinking would extend to Quicken Accounts. 

It's not at all uncommon that sole proprietors/independent contractors don't have dedicated "business" accounts" but instead run their business activity through their regular bank accounts, credit card accounts, and so forth.  And that's the "truth" of the situation: all of the "business" activity, irrespective of what accounts are involved, is all "your" money and without doing a lot of analysis it's next to impossible to create a "business" balance sheet. 

As I think about it it's literally impossible as Quicken has no "equity" Account it can access to provide the "balancing entry" to the business assets and liabilities.  In order to do this within Quicken you'd have to create a separate Quicken file for the business and pass cash back and forth between your personal file and the business file.

It might be time to look into QuickBooks.

Chris_B

Tom Young said:

Sorry, there's no way I can do what you ask since I'm only another Quicken user, not "Official Quicken Support."

Since I don't have the business product I'm a bit at sea here.  I've frequently seen references to making sure that "business" Categories are properly linked to Schedule C in order to get Spending reports (I'm guessing "P&L" reports in Business Quicken) to come out properly, but I wouldn't think that sort of thinking would extend to Quicken Accounts. 

It's not at all uncommon that sole proprietors/independent contractors don't have dedicated "business" accounts" but instead run their business activity through their regular bank accounts, credit card accounts, and so forth.  And that's the "truth" of the situation: all of the "business" activity, irrespective of what accounts are involved, is all "your" money and without doing a lot of analysis it's next to impossible to create a "business" balance sheet. 

As I think about it it's literally impossible as Quicken has no "equity" Account it can access to provide the "balancing entry" to the business assets and liabilities.  In order to do this within Quicken you'd have to create a separate Quicken file for the business and pass cash back and forth between your personal file and the business file.

It might be time to look into QuickBooks.

Sorry, I didn't mean for YOU, personally, to fix this.  That was meant towards Quicken.

All of my business spending is properly organized and categorized.  That's not what I'm writing about.

*side note: if one runs a business, and not a maybe profitable hobby, the "truth" of the situation is that it's not only terrible practice to co-mingle personal and business funds, it can kill any business protection you may otherwise have if you didn't do this.  It is not, legally, all "your" money.  It is, legally, the money of the business, and MUST be treated as such.  If you treat it all as your money, it is not, legally, a business.  Anyone using their personal accounts for business doesn't need, and probably shouldn't use the Business version of Quicken.

Quicken is perfectly able to do offset accounting, as long as you understand what you are doing.

Regardless, none of that is actually related to my original post.  My post, and request are far more simple.

In Quicken, you designate an account as Personal, Business, or Rental (which is really wrong, as a rental is actually a business, and should be treated as such).  When you select a BUSINESS report, it should, by default ONLY include BUSINESS accounts.  That is all I'm asking.  Remove all personal accounts from all business reports by default.  It should take a programmer about 5 minutes to make this happen.

Finally, while I do appreciate your efforts to help, this is not something you actually can help with, so let's just hope someone from Quicken sees this and can get this simple change to happen.

Thanks again for trying to help.

Jim_Harman

I understand your point about what the defaults should be, but is it really that much trouble to create a saved report that includes just your business accounts? You can put the saved report on the Toolbar if you want so it is even fewer clicks to access than the standard report.

One downside of modifying the defaults in any of the standard reports is that it would change the behavior for users who use the report as it is now.

Stephanie

I'm having the same issue. But I did select Business. It is showing Cash and Bank Accounts, but then shows Other Assets and shows the name of my business with a -$120k! I have no idea where that came from. The close that could be too would be the income I've made since I started freelancing, but it would be a positive number. Weird.