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I am paying monthly mortgage payment ( split into Principle, interest and escrow)

gearyjo

I want the total payment to show up as an expense under total expenses each month. How do I add the total payment for this reason?

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jacobs

Transfer transactions which also had categories is something which existed in Quicken Mac but is being removed. It was needed for Quicken Essentials, the predecessor program whose code base the modern Quicken Mac was built on, but it really violates some fundamental rules of accounting; Quicken management has said they will remove this capability fully in the future.

Currently, it's still possible to do, if you enter the fields in a certain order, but I don't advise it because you can get messed up in reports and budget, as you've discovered. Instead, I suggest including transfers as needed in your reports and/or budget as described above. Payment of loan principal isn't an expense in the accounting world, but by adding Transfers to Loan in your report, you can make it show up as an expense.

Your transaction in your checking account should be a split, with one split line having Category=Interest expense and another line having Category="Transfer:[Loan Account]". (If you pay money into an escrow account for taxes and/or insurance, you could have another split line for the transfer into the escrow account.)

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jacobs

First, for accounting purposes, the payment of principal isn't an expense; it's a transfer between an asset (your checking account) and a liability (your loan). That's why this doesn't appear in a typical accounting income statement.

But, of course, the payment of principal feels like an expense, because you have the money going out every month. For this reason, Quicken Mac allows you to selectively specify transfers in reports and budgets when you want to see them included in your expenses. ("Selectively" is important: you don't want to see in your expenses, for example, the transfer from checking to a credit card account, because you've already registered those expenses as the transactions in your credit card account.)

To include transfers in a report, you need to do some tweaking of the default report settings. In the Edit screen, first select the Accounts tab and exclude the loan account. Then, in the Advanced tab, select "Transfers: Include only transfers with accounts outside of report". So this is saying that the report should include transfers when the transfer is to an account not included in the report -- in this case, your loan. You'll see the transfer(s) at the bottom of your expenses in the report.

To include transfers in a budget, the approach is similar. Click Edit Budget, click Select Categories, and scroll down to "t" where you'll see "Transfers In" and "Transfers Out"; select what you want to see in your budget -- in this case, Transfers to Loan Account.

Greg Jones

A similar question if I may ... For category expense reporting I want to track "principal" and "interest" as this is money going "out". To track the loan/liability I also want the principal and interest amounts to go to that account. My reading suggests I should be able to do both of these things using a Linked Transfer where I enter a split transaction with "principal" and "interest" in the Category fields and the loan/liability account in the separate Transfer field. However I'm finding that while these categories appear in my budget, the corresponding dollar amounts do not so long as a value appears in the Transfer field. If I remove the loan/liability account from the value field, then the dollar amounts appear. Following the above I edited the budget, went to Select Categories and see Transfers Out, so I selected the loan/liability account. I then went to Select Accounts and added the appropriate Property & Debt account. Dollar amounts still do not display in the budget. Advice?

jacobs