Mint would let me do this -- categorizing transfers

J Vaccaro

I just switched over from Mint, and my primary use of the software is to track all my expenses and stay on budget. Sometimes I have a greater expense than my budget allows (like an expensive car repair). In those cases what I do is to transfer money from my savings account to my checking account to make up for the budgetary overspend. When that transfer showed up in my checking account as a deposit, Mint would allow me to categorize it as a Service & Parts deposit (like putting some cash back into my car service envelope).
Is it really true that Quicken won't let me do that?
I can categorize a Venmo deposit or a check deposit or even an atm cash deposit, but I can't categorize a transfer from my savings account?

NotACPA

And Mint is wrong, re: this.

Income and Expense items (categories, in Q) either increase or decrease your net worth. A transfer does neither, it just moves money from one pocket to another.

To see the impact of transfers, use a Cash Flow report.

Chris_QPW

Transfers can be included in the budget, but probably isn't going to work for this situation because you are budgeting all the transfers from or to a given account. So, it might work for someone wanting to include the transfer to a loan account, because that is the reason for such a transfer, but not with a savings account because and checking account because you will have other reasons for the transfer.

One might guess that the reason Mint allowed categorizing transfers is because in didn't really have "real/linked" transfers. Just deposits and withdraws. Quicken Mac was rewritten for the longest time it didn't have linked transfers, as such you could put any category you wanted on the two transactions that were in the real world a transfer. When it finally got linked transfers then categorizing them wasn't possible.

Even though it isn't recommended and wouldn't be treated as a transfer in Quicken one could just record a regular deposit and withdraw and then make them any category you liked.