Help with setting up Costco transactions.

TTSguy

Can someone give me ideas how to set up categories, and tabs when setting up purchases at Costco. Usually about half is groceries (food) the rest is misc, tires or other. I'd like to set up splits so whatever the total bill is, it automatically splits to 50% Groceries/Food, and 50% Misc/other. I think I know how but have many old years worth to change, and want new transactions to get split automatically. I was thinking to just split a reference bill of $100 with split of $50 for Groceries\Food and $50 for Misc\Other and let quicken do the rest???? then after getting that Memorized Payee set how to use it to change current Costco transactions? Thanks

Tom Young

I couldn't copy the "Help" file topic "How do I memorize and use a split transaction with percentages?" so I took a screenshot of the process:

You should be able to find this by clicking on Help > Quicken help and doing a little searching.

However, you can't apply this memorized payee "backwards" over prior transactions; any splitting that you want to do to older transactions you'd have to do manually.  Frankly if you haven't saved every receipt from prior Costco visits I wouldn't even bother with trying to split out those transactions because that information is, essentially, lost.

Looking at our family's Costco charges over the last year or so I counted 14 different Category/SubCategory that I've used over that time, with some transactions also Tagged, so trying to set up some sort of "standardized" Costco memorized payee doesn't seem to practical to me unless you really want to limit yourself to "Food" and "Miscellaneous", and nothing else.  But setting that up as a standardized split percentage breakout doesn't seem to add much value to the accounting process.