Category for both Income+Expense

Churchlady

I asked this before, but now have a better understanding of Quicken. As an example, I created a category named Ladies Luncheon. There will be both income and expense for the category. Can I just set a up as an expense category and enter every transaction under that both income and expense. In the report,it just shows income offsetting the expense.

Tom Young

"Can I just set a up as an expense category and enter every transaction under that..."

Yes.

"both income and expense. In the report,it just shows income offsetting the expense."

I think you'd like to have the "income" (reimbursements, I'd guess) entered into the Category show up in the Income section of reports and the expense entries show up in the Expenses section of reports?  If that's correct, then no, the net of the two will always show as an expense, even if reimbursements exceed expenditures.  In that situation the Category will show as a "negative expense."

Churchlady

If setting up both an income and expense category for say example Ladies Luncheon, can I name them the exact same name. I tried that and after setting up expense and then trying to set up income with the same category name it made me do it as a subcategory.....

Tom Young

Well, that kinda makes sense.  Quicken really doesn't have any way that I'm aware of to distinguish two Categories with the exact same name, one being "income" and the other being "expense."  IF you want to make the distinction between "inflows" (reimbursements?) and "outflows" then you will need slightly different names.  Frankly, keeping everything in one Category makes more sense to me, for a couple of reasons: 1) "Reimbursements" are, in an accounting sense, certainly not "income", unless you're adding a profit margin of some sort to reimbursements, and, 2) "Reports" of various sorts certainly can give you granular information about "inflows" and "outflows", if that's of interest to you.