In a Report, why does an expense category show up under Money In?

Question

In this case, out of 30 or so expense categories, just 'miscellaneous' shows up "Money In".
 I have double checked that 'miscellaneous' is checked as an expense in the category window.

jacobs · Answer

Adding to what @Jon wrote above, which report you're using is important here, as is the category Type (income or expense) you have assigned to the category.

If you are using the old Category Summary report (in "Other Reports" on the Reports menu, or with a gray icon if you have a saved report in My Reports), then a category will switch between Income and expenses in the report depending on the total of the transactions. So as Jon said, if you have more money in than money out in that category for the time period you've selected for the report, it will show up as Income; if you have more money out than money in, it will show up under Expenses.

This is obviously not good design, so it's been fixed in reports which use the modern reports engine. So if you use Category Summary Year to Date or Category Summary by Month or any of the reports in the Summary section of reports (or any of the comparable Transaction reports if you're looking for the transaction details), a category will appear based solely on the Type of account you define it as. If you define Miscellaneous as an expense, but you have more money in than money out, it will still show up under Expenses, but the amount will be positive — the opposite of expenses.

If you are, in fact, using the Category Summary report, I encourage you to stop using it. This is one of several known problems with that report, which comes from old code which has not been maintained in recent years. The developers plan to eventually remove all the old reports (the ones with gray icons) to solve this, but they haven't yet done so.

Jon · Answer

Which reports are you seeing this in? I did a little playing around just now but I couldn't get any of my expense categories to appear alongside the income categories when they had a positive balance; even the Miscellaneous category stayed where it was supposed to. But maybe I look at different reports than you do.

Correction: I could get "Uncategorized" to move back & forth between being Income or Expense depending on whether it was positive or negative.

TylerC · Answer

No, the transactions are a variety of expenses that don't fit in another category, hence I label them as 'miscellaneous'.