Categories

Churchlady

As an example, we have a program at church that will involve both income and expenses. Can I just create an expense category and just use add deposit to same category that would just offset expenses or do I create both an income and expenses category for that program?

Boatnmaniac

You could do that but it would then be difficult to track income vs expenses for the program because they will offset each other in that category.  For instance, if you had $125 in expenses and $100 in income and you pull a Spending by Category report I would think you would want to see these listed in that report.  But instead what you would see is that you had $25 in net expenses.  And if you will want to Budget for this program you would not be able to if you used the same category.

There are times when it would make sense to do this, such as when you purchase an item from a store but later return it to the store for a refund.  In this case you would want the two transactions to offset each other so it shows $0 expense in reports.

Generally, it is best, however, to use two separate categories...one for the expenses and another for the income.  Then you will see the income and the expenses broken out separately in reports.

Jim_Harman

It is good to be asking this up front, before you have accumulated a lot of data.

Quicken allows one Category to have both income and expenses. It is up to you whether you call it an Income or an Expense Category. But for reporting and tracking purposes, you may sometimes want to separate the income from the expenses by using separate categories. 

For example at a church mission trip, you might have donations and participant fees as income plus various types of expenses. If you lump these into one "Mission Trip" Category in Quicken, it may be difficult to separate them out later. You also will not want to generate special Categories for each event. One way to approach this would be to use a Quicken Tag for each program or event and have more general Categories such as Donations, Program Fees, and Program Expenses.  Then you can generate reports either by the type of income and expense, or see both income and expenses by program.

Other Categories make sense to lump together. A personal example would be clothing. If I buy two shirts and return one, I would use one Clothing Category and apply both the charges and the return to that Category.