How are you categorizing home office expenses like utilities?

A Pensive Panda

I see that Quicken Mac can attach the schedule C expense category to a category, but how are you categorizing and keeping home office expenses like utilities or maintenance properly calculated?

When looking at monthly gas and electric bills: I am guessing they would be split in each transaction. This could be done with a manual split to each transaction each month: some categorized as Home Office: Utilities (business) expense and the remaining amount categorized as personal Utilities. However, I'd like to automate as much as possible here. Since the office can be calculated as a percent of the home, can a QuickFill Rule use a reference of the total in it then multiple the percent, or must it be a number and not a formula?

For Example, the split for 10% business would ideally be:

[transaction total] * 0.10 = Home office category (Business)
[Remainder] = Utility category (Personal)

Thoughts?

jacobs

There is no way to build a math-based rule to split a transaction between two categories.

You could create a manual scheduled transaction for split expenses. For those which are a fixed amount each month, this is all you'd need. For those with a variable amount each month, like utilities, you'd have to manually edit the split amount each month.

Or… do you really need specific monthly reports reflecting your home office expenses? You need this at year-end for your taxes; do you need the breakdown month by month? If not, you could make one annual or semi-annual manual transaction to allocate the business portion of your home expenses.