Do you need a separate Quicken file for each tax payer / business?

DPF

My parner (unmarried) started her own buisness last year (I am W-2). It is tax time and our finances ar hopelessly entangled, so I purchased Q H&B and spent a whole weekend categorizing and running reports for our accountant. I did this by creating one super Quicken file that had 22 joint and personal accounts in it.

Now that taxes are in, I would like to set up Quicken properly to manage our household. Should I set up a separate quicken file for each tax entity (me, her, the business), who gets the rental? Or, is it possible to keep them all together using tags or something to tell quicken what we need to do?

Rocket J Squirrel

Yes, we recommend that each tax entity have its own Quicken data file.

The general notion is that you would copy your "super" file to two other individual files, then delete accounts from each of the three files that don't belong to that particular entity.

The trick is in the copy process. You can't use Windows copy for this, because then all the files would have the same internal Quicken file ID. You must use the Quicken command File > Copy or Backup File… > Create a Copy or Template, as this creates new file IDs in the process.

Also, if there were Quicken transfers between tax entities in the super file, those will have to be replaced with ordinary categorized transactions because the transfer accounts won't exist in the new copies from which you've deleted unneeded accounts.