Category queston

jtdeac

I am using monthly withdrawls from my brokerage account to pay my expenses. However, the withdrawls are defaulting as personal income in my checking register.

What catorgory should they be using?

Tom Young

As a general accounting (not Windows or Mac specific) answer to your question, the deposit into the checking Account should NOT affect any Category. (in Quicken the word "category" refers to what real accountants would call "income or expense accounts.")

Instead the deposit would be deemed a Transfer, which is what Quicken calls movements of monies between balance sheet Accounts.

jacobs

@jtdeac Please clarify how you are utilizing Quicken. Is your brokerage account being tracked in Quicken, in addition to your checking account? If yes, you need two transactions: (1) In the brokerage account, a Sell transaction for the amount of whatever security(ies) you liquidated to create the cash you're moving to your checking account, and (2) a Transfer transaction to move the cash from the brokerage account to the checking account. If you create the in the brokerage account, the transaction Type=Payment/Deposit, and the Category would be "Transfer:[your checking account name]". The latter is a linked transaction which appears in the brokerage register as a withdrawal of cash and in the checking register as a deposit of cash. As Tom said above, there is no income or expense category involved.

If you do not have your brokerage account in Quicken, and are just downloading tehtransacitons from your checking account, Quicken probably just took a guess that the influx of cash is Personal Income. You can just edit the category to a generic Transfer (e.g. not linked to another account), which is simply putting "Transfer" in the Category field. This will increase the cash in your account, but won't count as income. If the Payee name for these transfers from your brokerage is unique, you can create a QuickFill rule to always apply the Transfer category for transactions for this Payee.