Moving Transactions Between Budgets

GEREEF

Hello, I have a couple different budgets I use (Personal, Work). These are totally separate quicken files in order to keep things separated in my mind, however, I use ONE credit card for both budgets and would like to be able to assign CC transactions to one or the other budgets as they are imported in. Is there a way to move transactions from one quicken account file to another? I'm not asking about moving transactions to different bank accounts within one file, but how to export or transfer individual transactions from one quicken file to another - so that I can keep transactions from different "budgets" separate without having to use more than one cc.

jacobs

There's no easy way to do export selected transactions from one file and import them into another file.

There'a hard way to do it, but it's more appropriate for one-time use than recurring use. But here's how you can get there…

• Start with the Quicken data file which has the credit card transactions. (I'll call this "Data File A".)
• Make a copy, so now you have "Data File A Copy".
• Open "Data File A Copy" and one at a time, delete every account except the credit card account you're interested in.
• Open the settings for the remaining credit card account, and Disconnect the account from downloading, and rename it. (I'll call it "CC Transfer".)
• In the credit card account, delete all the transactions prior to the time period you're interested in. (At this point, "Data File A Copy" contains only one account with only recent transactions.)
• Do File > Export > Quicken Transfer File (QXF)
• Open your other data file, "Data File B".
• Do Import > Quicken Windows File (QDF, QXF)
• You should now see the "CC Transfer" account in your sidebar. Open it.
• Do Select All to highlight all the transactions you imported, and click and drag a highlighted transaction to the real credit card account in the left sidebar.
• Delete the now-empty "CC Transfer" account in the left sidebar.

That's a lot of work to do on a recurring basis. 

My question is: why don't you import the same credit card account into both data files? You'll need to do whatever Payee and Category cleanup is necessary in two places, but that wold likely be faster than the procedure above. 

I have another question. You wrote: "I use ONE credit card for both budgets and would like to be able to assign CC transactions to one or the other budgets as they are imported in." Transactions aren't "assigned to a budget"; they "live" in an account. If you put only some of the transactions in this credit card account in one data file and the others in the parallel credit card account in the other data file, then neither credit card account in Quicken will match your real-world credit card account. In most cases, making your Quicken accounts match your real-world accounts should be your goal, so you can see your balance and reconcile the account each month. 

I don't know if your work expenses are ones which are reimbursed by your business? What I used to do when I charged a lot of work expenses to my personal credit card was to have an asset account in Quicken for Work Expenses. When I made a purchase, it was recorded in my credit card account, and instead of a category, it was a Transfer to the Work Expenses account. then when I got reimbursed, the deposit in my checking account would also be a Transfer to the Work Expenses account, offsetting the original charge transactions. I don't know if this, or some variation of using an asset/liability account in your main data file, so you can keep all your credit card transactions together in one place, would work for what you are trying to do.

Of course the simplest suggestion is to simply get a different credit card to use for just your business expenses.