How to record a car purchase with cash and carry it as a depreciating asset?

Question

Hi!

I am buying a used car with cash, and possibly carrying some portion on a 0% APR purchases credit card. What approach can I use to track this in Quicken Mac without having the cash outlay appear as an expense?

In the past I've manually depreciated the asset and excluded that from expense and cash flow reports. In Quicken Mac, there seems to be no way to exclude transfers between only some accounts. It's all or nothing. In Quicken Win I could pick whether a transfer into or out of an account was included in a cash flow report on an account by account basis. (This is done by (de)selecting an account in [brackets] under the Categories tab, rather than the accounts tab.)

Thanks.

jacobs · Answer

You can definitely create an asset account for the car if you wish. Create an asset account. Enter a transaction in your cash account to transfer the payment amount to the asset account. Then, periodically make an entry in the asset account categorized to depreciation expense, reducing the remaining value of the asset account.

In reports, under Edit, you can go to the Advanced tab to select that you want to "include transfers only with accounts outside of report", and on the accounts tab, set which accounts to include. So if you include your cash account and asset account in a report, and check that option, the transfer of cash to the asset account will not appear in the report.