Help with Busy Family Categories, Sub Categories and Tags for reporting purposes

Question

Hello, this is my first time posting in the Quicken community. I have Quicken Premier for Mac, Version 7.3.2, (Build 703.50456.100). I am struggling with basic reporting and budgeting features in Quicken and I'm realizing its because I'm not using Categories, Subcategories or Tags correctly or consistently. Does anyone have any "best practices" or examples or suggestions for how an average family would setup their categories, subcategories and tag setup? I want to be able to pull basic reports (monthly, quarterly and annually for example) and see how were our money is going and more specifically, be able to see how much we're spending on specific children (clothing, shopping, gifts, school, etc). We have about 200+ transactions per month, a lot of different accounts, credit cards, bills and miscellaneous spending.

Any suggestions or guidance would be very appreciated. Thanks!

jacobs · Answer

@ES88  I agree with simplifying, but I'd just caution not to oversimplify until you've worked with it a while. Here's why…

If you start out using three categories or sub-categories and later decide it isn't worth that degree of separation, you can combine the three categories into one with one command, and all your prior transactions will be updated to the newly-combined category. But if you do the opposite — start with one category and later decide you need more detail from three — there's no way for Quicken to automatically separate your past data; you'll need to go back through the transactions one at a time to update the category used.

ES88 · Answer

That helps so much and gives me something to start with.  I definitely need to simplify quicken as much as possible so I can see what I need to in the reporting without overcomplicating it. I think I'm going to start with combining some of the over detailed, rarely used sub-categories and categories and go from there. Really helpful. Thank you so much. E

jacobs · Answer

Typically, you would use categories that correspond to the types of things you're spending on: clothes, groceries, household supplies, toys, gifts, car, vacations, etc. If you want to then track by individual family members, create and use Tags for each family member. That allows you to create reports in two dimensions: by category, by tag (individuals), or a cross-tab report with categories in rows and tags in columns.

Use sub-categories when you want to see individual components of something larger. For example: for Auto, you might have sub-categories for fuel, repairs, parking. For travel, you might have sub-categories for airfare, hotels, admissions.

We all think about our expenses differently, so it's hard to give you a definitive set of categories or sub-categories to use. And sometimes, we start with too many categories or sub-categories, and fortunately Quicken makes it easy to later combine two or more into one if you realize you don't need to parse, say, fast-food dining from sit-down restaurant dining.

Does that help? Do you have more specific questions we could weigh in on? Please feel free to post back. 😀