Using a Utility Holding Account

mdchafin

Instead of having the utility companies hold my monies for level payment plans, I've created a utility holding account with a set amount for Nat. Gas and Electric transferred from the household checking account.

I would like to categorize each has Nat. Gas and Electric for budgeting purposes but the system insists that it be transfer. How do I accomplish and keep my planning budget correct?

Tom Young

It's not clear to me what you're trying to accomplish here.  I take it that this "utility holding account" isn't a real-world account, or is it?  If the former, I take it that you're making pretend transfers of a set amount of a set amount of cash and if the latter I guess you're making real-world transfers of cash, but I assume that the utility companies want real-world cash payments of some amount each month, so where is that cash coming from and how is it accounted for?  Maybe you could add some real world details of what's going on here and what you want to see for budgeting and "actual" purposes?

Within Quicken you can certainly show for both budgeting and actual purposes transfers as a form of income ( FROM {Name of Account} ) and expense ( TO {Name of Account} ), but you can't show a single transfer as both a quasi-expense ( TO {Name of Account} ) and an actual Category.

UKR

Do you use a Budget?
This would be the natural place for tracking your utility expenses.
The actual monthly payment from your bank account is categorized as, e.g., Utilities:Gas or Utilities:Electric.
In the budget for each of these categories you average the total annual expense to set the monthly budgeted amount (i.e., (sum of a year's utility bills)/12 = average monthly amount)
Some months you'll be over budget, some under, but at the end of the year you should come out even.

Unknown

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