Split transactions can't have different dates, need a new way to amortize a transaction over budgets

sammysheep

Long time Minter, first time Quickenite.

It was customary for me to split a large transaction (usually unexpected) and "amortize" the expense over several months of budgets. For example, I might take a large car repair expense, and split the transaction over several months, sometimes using a different category such as Emergency Fund to offset things (canceling other withdrawals to balance my budget).

Is there a better way to do this in the Quicken way?

jacobs

In Quicken Mac, a a transaction maps to a real world transaction. You can split the expense (or income) among multiple categories, but it's still just one transaction. In the example you mention, there is only a single transaction: paying for a car repair. What you're wanting to do involves budgeting, not actual real-world transactions.

Quicken Mac doesn't currently have features built-in for envelope budgeting or savings fund budgeting, although the developers have recently said that some form of that will be coming in the future.

Meanwhile, there are few ways you can do what you describe, and you'll have to decide what's worth the bother.

Some users will simply adjust their budgets rather than messing with creating transactions to move money around. For instance, let's say in your budget for the year, you budgeted $1,200 for car repairs and spread it out as $100 per month. Then in September you had a repair for $1,000. You could just edit your budget values to be 0 for January through August, $1,000 for September, and spread the remaining $200 over the remaining months.

But if you want to create a pseudo emergency fund, you could create an asset or liability account and transfer money in and out of it. So for your $1,000 car repair, you'd enter a $1,000 transaction in your credit card or checking account to reflect the payment. If you want to spread the expense out, for budget purposes, over four months, you could split that transaction to make $250 (first month) Auto:Service expense and $750 a transfer to the Emergency Fund account. Then you'd make transactions the next three months to spend/reduce $250 and categorize the expense as Auto:Service. (You could create one scheduled transaction for multiple months of apportionment.) You just have to make sure to periodically make sure the remaining balance in the Emergency Fund zeros out, or that you can account for the remaining balance, since there's no real-world account to reconcile it to.