Sale of home entry

Diana Salmon

How should I record the sale of a house?

Tom Young

It depends on how accurate you want to be.  If you simply want to get the house off Quicken you can make an entry in the house Account in the "Decrease" column in the amount of the house with an offsetting entry to the same Account (surrounded by square brackets] in the Category field and the house will disappear without affecting any other Account in the file. 

A small step up from doing it this way is the vastly simplified entry shown here:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20170717#Comment_20170717

where you make an entry closing out the loan, the house, record the net deposit into your checking Account and the balancing entry is a gain or loss.  You could make this entry in any of the Accounts involved but it's probably easiest to do this as a split entry in the checking Account, entering the net deposit and then splitting that deposit out to the other Accounts and a Category of your choosing.

Of course accounting for a house sale really is more complex than that if you try to break out all of the components of the sale, like property taxes (either a credit to you for taxes you've paid or a charge for taxes you owe), interest paid in closing and so forth.