Business Transactions in Mac Business & Personal

Greydog9928

On Quicken Mac Business & Personal 7.5.1

I am having downloading transactions and am attempting to add them to one of my created business in quicken. Upon attempting to do this, I get an error message saying "the value in the Business field will not be saved. A transaction [or split line] can only have a business when it is also using a business category."

I go to the categories field, attempt to see if there is an option to select it as a business category and there is but it is greyed out. I then see I have to "migrate it" to make it a business category which I then do. I then attempt to add the transaction to the business but I still get the same error message.

A few points I would like to make:

1] the user should not have to designate a single transaction [with a category I already selected] to a new category. Choosing the business should take care of that and make it a transaction under the business.

2] This is way to much work for the user to do for each transaction. It should not be this cumbersome.

3] I decided I did not like this and see no way to undo the migration to a business category. Do I have to restore from a backup?

4] There are some instances where a category should apply to BOTH personal and business [utilities come to mind for personal and rentals/businesses]. I would like to keep the same categorization and have the business designation column determine if it is meant for personal or not. It should not require an entire duplicate set of categories.

jacobs

I do understand your frustration. I think most of it is because it's new, and you don't have all your business categories set up, nor QuickFill rules which would speed data entry.

Quicken uses the Categories for separating business from personal income and expenses. I'm not sure if they could have done it differently, requiring just an entry in the Business field to separate business from personal, but that's not the way it works.

This means you will likely have some categories — probably a small number — which need to exist as both business and personal categories or subcategories. But setting this up is mostly a one-time startup issue, not something that will be an ongoing problem.

When you edit a transaction, you won't see that dialog as you enter the Business and change the category to a business-related category at the same time. If you have multiple businesses, if you can start the name of each one with a different letter or number, you'll only ever need to type one character in the business field to select the one you want.

If you create QuickFill rules for some of your business Payees, you can have the Business name and the business-related category automatically entered for you.

1] the user should not have to designate a single transaction [with a category I already selected] to a new category. Choosing the business should take care of that and make it a transaction under the business.

It can't change the category automatically, because not all users will have an identically-named category defined for both personal and business.

2] This is way to much work for the user to do for each transaction. It should not be this cumbersome.

See my comments above. It only feels like a lot because you're just getting started. It won't be much work at all once you've got your categories squared away and QuickFill rules set up.

3] I decided I did not like this and see no way to undo the migration to a business category. Do I have to restore from a backup? 

Go to Windows > Categories, double-click the category, and change it from business to personal. (You can only do this for main categories, not sub-categories; sub-categories are always the same type as their main category.)

4] There are some instances where a category should apply to BOTH personal and business [utilities come to mind for personal and rentals/businesses]. I would like to keep the same categorization and have the business designation column determine if it is meant for personal or not. It should not require an entire duplicate set of categories.

As noted above, it doesn't work that way. You will need to have a few categories in duplicate for business and personal use. You can either make all your business categories a sub-category of Quicken's default Business Expenses category, or you can make them stand-alone by designating one as "Utilities (Business)" or "Utilities (Personal)". I'd guess that for most people, this will amount to fewer than a dozen "duplicate" categories.

Greydog9928

Thanks for the reply.

I understand it doesn't work that way where you can use the same category for both business and personal, but it would be much better if it was designed that way. I am a beta tester and also providing feedback to the Quicken group to let them know I think the product would work much better and straight forward in that regard. Simply add that transaction to a business and you are done, no other steps needed.