How can I streamline my Shopping category and subcategories?

hbwilliams22

In 2024, I am hoping to refine my Shopping category and subcategories (as pictured in the attached image). For anything 'general' shopping, I categorize it as the parent "Shopping" category which displays "Shopping (Other)" in reports. I do this as a catch-all for non-specific shopping transactions. For Amazon purchases, I categorize them as "Amazon" as I do not have the time or energy to parse all Amazon transactions. "Digital & Misc" is basically anything that is purchased one-off or through apps (new phone, movie rentals etc).

Does anyone have recs on how they break out their shopping?

jacobs

How to categorize one's spending is a very individual, personal decision. I bet if you got 100 Quicken Mac users to list all their shopping categories/sub-categories, you'd find at least 80, if not 100, variations. 😀

The first thing to address is what you consider "shopping". To me, the grocery store is shopping, but you don't show it here. I consider my trips to Home Depot & Lowe's to be shopping, but mostly for categories which don't fit any of your sub-categories. So one question I'd pose is whether you want to have Shopping as a main category with all forms of shopping as subcategories under it. I don't; for me Clothing, Lawn & Garden, Household, Entertainment, etc. are independent main categories. But there's nothing wrong with grouping them together under Shopping if that's what you prefer.

However, I don't think you need "1. Shopping (other)" as a sub-category. If you categorize an expense as just "1. Shopping" — main category, no sub-category — then it will show up on reports as "1. Shopping (Other)".

And I don't understand the sub-category "Total 1. Shopping". On a report, or in a budget, Quicken will show the total all the "1. Shopping" and its subcategories. you aren't categorizing expense transactions as "Total 1.Shopping", right?

I do understand why you don't want to mess with your Amazon purchases — but I'll just say that I view it differently because I don't consider "Amazon" to be a product or service. I want to know how much we spend on clothing or groceries or household items or lawn products or electronics, and so I do find it worthwhile to split my Amazon purchases into appropriate categories.

The question is: how do you use your income and expense category reporting from Quicken? Is it to set and stay on a budget? Is it to understand your expenses now and how they will change when you retire? Is it just to give you a ballpark idea of your income versus your expenses? If you determine you want/need to cut your expenses, do you have enough granularity to understand your past spending and to decide where to spend less in the future? You could say, "well, I need to spend less at Amazon" and maybe that's enough — but maybe you'd want to know that 60% of your Amazon spending went to clothing, 20% to food and household items, and 20% to hobbies and entertainment in order to see what you can and can't feasibly cut.

Chris_QPW

There is always a tradeoff between how lazy/automatic you want to make it and the number of details you can pull out of the data. I'm probably near the "most lazy". There is just me and my wife, and we aren't really concerned much about the details. In fact, if it wasn't for answering questions on here and sort of needing to feed some of the Quicken features with data, I probably would be even lazier. We aren't (and really never have been) in the mode of "looking for ways to cut spending".

My general approach, with a bit of manual entry is that the payee names pretty much all translate directly to a given category. And in some cases, multiple payee/store names are the same category.

So, for instance, Safeway is Groceries, no more details than that. Amazon tends to be one that requires the most manual updating, but I'm not really picky about it either. Default is Household, but when buying more expensive items that don't really fit that it might get Entertainment (my wife's hobby of collecting Christmas stuff and nick knacks) or Computer. Computer pops up because I don't spend on it very often, but when I do it tends to be a larger amount.

As such, our categories tend to be very generic.

hbwilliams22

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20408250#Comment_20408250

To me, groceries are a living expense under "Food" parent, similar to home supplies under "Home" parent. I consider shopping as a discretionary expense. I have two primary categories (Living & Discretionary) with subcategories below them. This allows me to easily see how much I am spending on necessities and how much I am spending on discretionary thins.

I don't think you need "1. Shopping (other)" as a sub-category. If you categorize an expense as just "1. Shopping" — main category, no sub-category — then it will show up on reports as "1. Shopping (Other)".

• I thought this was how I set it up. I guess I have a "Shopping (Other)" category under my parent "Shopping" category. I will change that.
  

And I don't understand the sub-category "Total 1. Shopping". On a report, or in a budget, Quicken will show the total all the "1. Shopping" and its subcategories. you aren't categorizing expense transactions as "Total 1.Shopping", right?

• This is what my shopping categories look like

The question is: how do you use your income and expense category reporting from Quicken? Is it to set and stay on a budget? Is it to understand your expenses now and how they will change when you retire? Is it just to give you a ballpark idea of your income versus your expenses?

• Primarily to get a high-level view and understanding of where my money is going and to identify areas where I could cut if needed. Additionally, for cash flow purposes. I do not operate on a strict budget but rather want to keep a pulse on my spending.

jacobs

Ah, okay, what you posted the first time was a report, so it had an "other" automatically and a total. I thought the screenshot was from your Categories window, but now with the screenshot you just added, I see that the categories window has the subcategories as I would have expected them.

As I wrote initially, how to categorize your income and expenses is a personal decision, and we all can have different ideas about how to organize our categories and subcategories.You asked how others organize their expense categories, so I told you what I do. I don't have high-level categories for Living and Discretionary, with sub-categories and sub-sub categories below them, but you find doing that is helpful for you. I want to split my Amazon purchases into the buckets of expenses I use for other purchases; you don't want to spend the time doing that, and get enough information from just seeing your Amazon purchases lumped together as a category. No one is right or wrong; it's all a matter of how you think of your spending and how you use the data.

Chris_QPW

One of the features that Quicken Mac is currently missing would change this a bit too, and that is category groups.

Your "Living Expenses" and "Discretionary" in Quicken Windows the user probably would have set them up as category groups.

The main difference between using a parent category for this and parent group is just where these groupings show up.

For instance, the top-level grouping in the Quicken Windows budget is that category groups, some are built in, and others can be created by the user. Here are mine:

And some of the reports can be organized by category group.

An example of why this instead of a parent category I can select between three different organizations of some reports:

Category group looks like this:

And Income & Expense:

jacobs

Just to be clear, what @Chris_QPW discusses and illustrates above illuminates an area of difference between Quicken Windows and Quicken Mac if you're curious — but for someone on Quicken Mac, it's irrelevant because category groups don't exist on Quicken Mac.

(I do find it interesting that with the many thousands of people who have migrated from Quicken Windows to Quicken Mac over the years, and with the various complaints about missing features in Quicken Mac compared to Quicken Windows, the absence of Category Groups is something I recall reading about only a handful of times; no one has even created an Idea thread requesting that functionality.)