Linked Transaction Not Appearing In Budget (Q Mac)

Darran_AUS

I've been using Quicken for many years now, and have only now started using the Budget features in the Mac version. When I first created a budget, I noticed my mortgage repayments were missing - but then realised being entered as a transfer (debit cheque account / credit liability account) would negate each other out and reflect as $0.

I then rad about LINKED TRANSFERS and followed the steps here to enter is entered as linked transaction .. https://help.quicken.com/display/MAC/Transferring%2Bmoney%2Bbetween%2Baccounts

But I'm still not seeing the mortgage:repayment category amounts on my budget.

The transaction has been entered as this …

• category = Mortgage:Repayment
• transfer = <name of liability account - as selected from accounts list>
  

My budget is set to exclude the liability account, so I don't report on the matching transaction (this making $0), but the budget still does not show the source transaction.

What am I doing wrong 😥

jacobs

What you're doing wrong is trying to make a transaction function as both a transfer and a categorized expense. A transfer of funds between one account and another is not income or expense. In the case of a mortgage payment, it's a transfer from an asset (checking) to a liability (loan). It feels like an expense from a cash flow perspective, but from an accounting perspective, this isn't a viable transaction. (The folks at Quicken had agreed to close this loophole and prevent entry of such transactions, but it seems to have fallen way down their priority list, so the program still allows you to do what you're doing… which it shouldn't.) So you should have the transfer be only a transfer, without adding a category.

In both budgets and reports, you can choose to circumvent the rules of accounting to include transfers as income/expense when you want to. In a budget, click Edit Budget, click Select Categories, scroll down to the t's, and check any of the Transfers In and Transfers Out items you want included in your budget. You typically wouldn't want something like a transfer to your credit card account in your budget, because that would double count the individual categorized transactions in the credit card account. But for a mortgage payment, you can add the transfer to the loan account if you want to include this among your expenses. In fact, there's a special category in the Select Accounts list just for mortgages to make this even easier: find "Mortgage Pmt" in the list, and you can include not only interest expense, but the principal payment and escrow payment as expenses if you wish. (Just be careful with adding the escrow payment; if you later record payment of insurance or taxes out of the escrow account, you'll be double counting expenses.)

jacobs

What you're doing wrong is trying to make a transaction function as both a transfer and a categorized expense. A transfer of funds between one account and another is not income or expense. In the case of a mortgage payment, it's a transfer from an asset (checking) to a liability (loan). It feels like an expense from a cash flow perspective, but from an accounting perspective, this isn't a viable transaction. (The folks at Quicken had agreed to close this loophole and prevent entry of such transactions, but it seems to have fallen way down their priority list, so the program still allows you to do what you're doing… which it shouldn't.) So you should have the transfer be only a transfer, without adding a category.

In both budgets and reports, you can choose to circumvent the rules of accounting to include transfers as income/expense when you want to. In a budget, click Edit Budget, click Select Categories, scroll down to the t's, and check any of the Transfers In and Transfers Out items you want included in your budget. You typically wouldn't want something like a transfer to your credit card account in your budget, because that would double count the individual categorized transactions in the credit card account. But for a mortgage payment, you can add the transfer to the loan account if you want to include this among your expenses. In fact, there's a special category in the Select Accounts list just for mortgages to make this even easier: find "Mortgage Pmt" in the list, and you can include not only interest expense, but the principal payment and escrow payment as expenses if you wish. (Just be careful with adding the escrow payment; if you later record payment of insurance or taxes out of the escrow account, you'll be double counting expenses.)

Darran_AUS

Thanks @jacobs - worked perfectly.