Transfer split category amounts into another account

break80

When I transfer money from one account to another, the receiving account category is always the transferring account name.  My problem may be depicted in this simple transferring example.  Let's say I deposit $1000 into my bank account and split as $700 in category1 and $300 in category2.  But now I need to transfer $500 into another bank account as $200 from category1 and $300 from category2.  How can I enter the transfer and retain both which account category that supplied the $500 AND the $300/$200 split categories?  

jacobs

You can't have a transaction which is both a category (income or expense) and a transfer (a funds transfer which is neither income nor expense). If you move $500 from one account to another — paying a credit card bill from your checking account, for example, or transferring money from a savings account to your checking account — then those transactions are transfers and don't have categories. If you want to split a transaction between several categories, are you actually spending money? Or are you trying to do this for your budget? It would help if you would give a real-life example of what you're trying to accomplish, and then we can suggest how you can get it done.

Jon

In preferences on the Register tab, uncheck "Allow creation of linked transfers using the category field". You can then have a split transaction that's a transfer with different categories for each part of the split:On the receiving side, each part of the split shows up with it's own category:

If you want to see where the money came from in the receiving account, click on the Columns button in the lower right corner and add a check mark next to "Transfer" to add that column to your register.

jacobs

I'm reluctant to advise creating transfers with categories because the former product manager stated last year that this capability will be removed from Quicken Mac at some point. It's a carry-over from the days of Quicken Essentials a decade ago, when reports and budgets couldn't handle transfers, but senior management at Quicken has determined this violates the basic rules of accounting. I can't say for certain this is still on their roadmap, but I would assume it is. So I think it's better to come up with a solution which won't be disrupted if they close the loophole which currently allows this. 

break80

Thank you all for your comments. I notice you are all mac users. I am a windows user so maybe i got into the wrong section. I presume the two versions can be different from what i have understood.  In any case, I would like to know if your comments apply to windows users as well. 

jacobs

Yes, as you can see at the very top of this page, this thread is posted in a Mac category of the forum.

We could have moderator move this thread to a Quicken Windows category, but I actually think all the existing comments would muddy the waters; instead, I suggest you just copy and paste your original comment above into a new discussion and post it in a Quicken for Windows category. I think you'll get better responses from the Quicken Windows experts that way.

break80

Thanks. Will do. 

jacobs

@MoMoney99 Three of the four Quicken moderators you tagged no longer work for the company.  

As for a once and for all pronouncement, we did get such an answer from Marcus, the former product manager, two years ago:

Quicken Mac theoretically does support transfers on categories but we're going to remove that capability in the not too distant future because it's not supported by the Quicken Cloud and Quicken Windows.  I can see your argument that it would be useful and Quicken Windows supports tax line items on transfer transactions to support tax reporting which is a kind of category on a transfer so there's a use case. However, the bottom line is the Mac product must line up with the rest of the Quicken ecosystem. This decision was made at the highest levels of our company so it's not going to be revisited.

Removing the capability is, I suspect, complicated, because they have to deal with users' existing transactions or find a way to "grandfather in" old transactions but prevent it from happening in new transactions. I'm guessing that's why the removal hasn't yet occurred. (Similarly, the old Category Summary report, which was supposed to be removed because it has been superseded and produces data errors, has still not been removed because they have to deal with people who have existing saved reports using the old reports engine.)

The one person who could possibly add insight to this is @Quicken Victoria, who succeeded Marcus as the Quicken Mac product manager.