Business and Personal Tracking: One Quicken File or Two Quicken Files

JoelC

I am currently using 1 Quicken file to track both business finances and personal finances.

I though that this was preferable over using 2 Quicken files (i.e., 1 for business finances and 1 for personal finances) for a number of reasons including:

i) better tracking of transfers between business accounts and personal accounts

ii) combined net worth statement

iii) combined measurement and view of investments

iv) easier maintenance only need to clean up one file

v) no need to switch between files

In digging into Quicken I found some limitations that are getting me to rethink this decision with the primary drivers being the business reporting is complicated by (what appears to be) the automatic application of taxes and the nested nature of the business expense / income sub-categories under Business Expenses / Business Income categories.

With this in mind I am very interested in views on teh following:

i) Preference for 1 Quicken or 2 Quicken Files?

ii) What is the best way to split a Quicken file into 2 Quicken files (if there even is a good way)? I am guessing that there is no good way and the only solution being to start both from scratch.

iii) Would you go through the effort of moving from 1 Quicken file to 2 Quicken files?

Thank you.

Chris_QPW

One of the things that is stressed over and over on this forum is each tax identity should be a separate file.

And as for splitting data files, as far as I know there isn't any easy way, but even more to the point, make sure you don't just do a Windows copy of the data file. Use Quicken's copy otherwise you will have two data files pointing at the same Quicken Cloud dataset. Not a good thing!