Business Name Is Incorrect After Account Transfer in Mac Business and Personal

Peter Marston

I recently upgraded to Quicken Classic: Business and Personal [Version 7.4.1 (Build 704.51555.100)] and have started to track business expenses.

I have a business named "Rose" and use that for the Business column in my checking account entry to transfer an amount to a second account. In the second account, the business name has been changed to the Quicken default "My Business" and cannot be changed back to "Rose".

It appears that this only happens with split transactions. My real life use case is transferring a property tax payment along with a hazard insurance payment in my rental mortgage transaction.

Has anyone else seen an issue like this with business names?

Example below.

jacobs

In the second account, the business name has been changed to the Quicken default "My Business" and cannot be changed back to "Pine".

Do you have two defined businesses, Rose and Pine? that is, when you click on the Business tab at the top does the pulldown at the upper left of the business Dashboard show "All Businesses", and if yo pull it down, you see Rose and Pine? For instance:

So assuming your businesses are properly set up, what happens with the transaction in your "Second Account" when you double-click the transaction you showed, and click in the Business field? You should see a dropdown menu of your businesses, and be able to select any one:

Quicken Mac has the concept of one of your businesses being the "Primary Business", and that's the one that will be the default on a newly-created transaction. You can change your overall default business by editing the business you want to make be the default:

But you should be able to change the business on any transaction at any time.

Peter Marston

Thanks for the fast response @jacobs. Rose should be the only business name other than the default My Business. I put in Pine by error.

It's a bit more complex than I thought. The transactions with the error are split transactions.

I'll update my post.

jacobs

@Peter Marston If I understand correctly, you're trying to transfer money from one checking account to another, while categorizing them as business expenses?

So the first issue is that transactions which have a transfer and a category have always been problematic in Quicken. (This has nothing to do with the new business features.) Such a transaction is not proper in accounting; transfers between accounts (assets or liabilities) cannot also be income or expense. The program originally allowed such transactions back in the day when they hadn't built in the capabilities to include selected transfers in reports and budgets. Once they added those capabilities, the developers stated they would remove the ability to have a category on a transfer transaction, but for some reason — probably the complexity of what to do with all such transactions users already have — they have never removed this loophole. But some reporting will see the transfer and ignore the category, so it's a good idea to avoid this.

Now, add the layer of the business field in transactions. A transfer transaction is basically one transaction which shows up in two different accounts. You can't have one Memo in one account of the transfer and a different Memo in the other account of a transfer. But it seems they've made its possible to have one business on one side of a transfer and another business on the other side of the transfer, which I wasn't aware of until I just tested this.

However, your transaction is a split in the originating account (Demo Checking). When you do this, which is perfectly fine, in the other account each split is a separate transaction, as you can see in your second account. In such a case, the transaction with the split is the "parent" and the transactions in the transfer destination/s is/are "child" transactions — and changes can only be made in the parent transaction. That's the dialog box you got, telling you to go other the other side of the transaction to make changes. Again, this has always been the case, and isn't new to the business features.

The way around all of this is to separate your transfers from your expense categorizations, and to not assign a business to the transfers. The transfers simply move money from one account to the other. Moving money from one account to the isn't an Advertising expense; the Advertising expense occurrs when you pay for advertising services, either as a check from a checking account or a charge on a credit card account. Categorize that transaction as Advertising Expense, and assign it to the proper business. If a payment/charge is split between different expense categories and/or different businesses, you can record all that properly in the split lines of the purchase/charge transacition, not the transfer transaction.

Peter Marston

Totally makes sense: " Moving money from one account to the isn't an Advertising expense; the Advertising expense occurrs when you pay for advertising services, either as a check from a checking account or a charge on a credit card account. Categorize that transaction as Advertising Expense, and assign it to the proper business."

Thank you.