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Generating accurate & understandable Monthly Spending Reports

mwoodpatrick

I'm trying to generate an accurate Monthly Spending Report but when I generate the spending report. It has some issues and I would appreciate any pointers on best way to generate an accurate report.

There are a number of items included in the report which I don't think should be there. The generated report lists credit card payments but since the payment is for items that are listed elsewhere in the report it seems like these costs are being accounted for twice.

The report also includes balance adjustments which are corrections where quicken somehow got out of sync with reality

The other issue I have is that when the spending report is exported to excel the subcategories got listed in the same column as the parent category which makes the report less clear.

Any pointers on how to rectify these issues would be much appreciated

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Tom Young

As to your first issue - credit card payments AND credit card charges showing up - one way of controlling that is to customize the report, go to the Advanced tab, and exclude all transfers from the report. Since I never have balance adjustments I can't say this for certain, but I would guess that would also eliminate those. ("Exclude Self-transfers")

I don't think there's any way to change the export process to Excel. That might require some Excel macro magic.

Jim_Harman

The transfer option you want is "Exclude internal". This excludes self-transfers such as balance adjustments and it also excludes transfers between accounts that are included in the report. Thus if your checking account and credit card account are included in the report, you will see credit card charges but not the transfer from the checking account to pay the card balance.

Sorry, I can't help with the Excel export.

mwoodpatrick

Many thanks for the information. Is there any documentation on this?

If I have a charge that's for a whole year is there a way to spread the cost over the whole year so that the monthly spending report just gets a 1/12 of that charge rather than being one lump some in a specific month?

Jim_Harman

There is documentation on the report transfer options but it is incomplete at best. I would call it incorrect. See

https://help.quicken.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=3216906

If you search this forum for "Exclude Internal" you will see several discussions that cover this.

There is no direct way to spread a charge in a report. You can use Savings Goals to do that.

Tom Young

By default the Spending report "Income and Expense by Category" (assumed to be the report you're using) are only "fed" detail information from the Accounts included in the Banking section of the Account Bar, and the Advanced option for Transfers is "Exclude internal." Accordingly if you simply pull up that report you'll see that transactions in the Banking section of Accounts that interact with the other "outside" Accounts in your file show up as "[FROM]{Account Name}" as Income and "[TO]{Account name} in Expenses.

Of course your real income and real expenses certainly aren't limited to what goes on in the Banking Accounts and those "TO/FROM" line items typically don't capture real incomes and expenses, they only represent Transfers, i.e., moving money from one pocket to another pocket. But with a bit of work on your part you can "fine tune" the Income and Expense by Category report as to what Accounts "feed"detail information to the report and what Transfers to and from "outside" Accounts show up as "income" ([FROM]) and "expense" ([TO]) line items. That can be accomplished by selectively customizing your report (and saving it) as to what Account will be feeding information to the report and what Accounts will be shown as "Categories" (those [To]/[FROM] lines on the report) and, depending, selectively changing the "Transfers" item on the Advanced tab.

But as to your specific question about only seeing 1/12th of your annual insurance premium on the spending report, that's easy enough:

Establish an Asset Account with a name like "Prepaid Insurance" or something similar
Transfer the annual premium out of the checking Account to this Prepaid Insurance Account and customize your Spending report to have this Account feed information to the report.
Establish a Reminder that will automatically post an entry to the Prepaid Insurance Account for 1/12th of the annual premium expensed to the Category of your chosing.
Set Transfers to "Exclude internal."

The Transfer of the annual premium won't show up in the report, but the 1/12th amortization will show up in the report.

Jim_Harman

@Tom Young Is your method for spreading expenses different in some way from Quicken's built in Savings Goals?

Tom Young

My method uses real Accounts with real purpose. You've spent the money (a real transaction) to buy a year's worth of coverage but you don't want the expense to show up on one month and you want that lump sum to be amortized over the coverage period. This is how you do that.

I see Savings Goals to be more of a "hide the pea" shell game in anticipation of some future cash expenditure. Money "disappears" (not really) and ends up as a quasi-asset. It's catering to the "if you can't see the money you won't spend it" sort of thinking.

UKR

An alternative to all the above suggestions would be to use the Budgets feature.
That's what I do to spread an annual insurance expense over the entire year.
I only have the one annual insurance payment transaction, due in July.
In the Budget I have budgeted for the entire amount, spreading it over all 12 months of the year. Unused budgeted amounts are allowed to rollover from one month to the next. At the end of the year, after the payment made in July, the budget vs. actual Balance amounts to 0.00