Can I get a report on how much tax I spent within a certain category?

jsquare

Apologies if this is a "Quicken 101" question, but I can seem to figure out an easy way to do this.

Is there a way to find out how much tax I spent on a certain item type?

So, let's say I have a business that makes Fruit Smoothies. My local grocery store charges tax on bananas, but not on strawberries (this is pretend, just go with me on this). When I buy strawberries, I file them under "Groceries:Fruit". When I buy a banana, I create a split item that has bananas filed under "Groceries:Fruit" but ALSO has the tax I spent filed under "Taxes:Grocery Tax".

Now, it's tax time, and my income tax consultant has asked me to provide them with the amount of Grocery Tax I spent strictly on Fruit. Doing a report on the amount I spent on Grocery Tax isn't right, because many of my non-fruit groceries are taxed. Doing a report on Fruit gives me a long list of my many fruit purchase but doesn't show me the Grocery Tax.

Is there a way for me to generate a report that creates a list that shows me only the Grocery Tax I've spent on Fruit?

I hope that makes sense!

Thanks,
J

Jon

I can't think of a way to filter a report on transactions so it filters one half of a split transaction based on the category of the other half of the split.

The only ways I can think of for you to get what you want is to either make a unique "Grocery Tax On Fruit" category so you can generate a report for just that category, or to add a "Fruit" tag to Grocery Tax transactions when they are for fruit so you can filter a Grocery Tax category report to only include transactions with the Fruit tag.

RickO

This seems like a perfect use for tags. Make a tag "Tax". Then in your split transaction you'd have two lines both with Category Groceries:Fruit. The first line with be the cost of the fruit with not Tag attached. The second line would be the tax and would have the Tag "Tax" in addition to Category Groceries:Fruit. Then it's easy to pull up a report for each category showing only the ones that were tagged "Tax". Similar to what Jon suggested but in reverse.

Jon

I can't think of a way to filter a report on transactions so it filters one half of a split transaction based on the category of the other half of the split.

The only ways I can think of for you to get what you want is to either make a unique "Grocery Tax On Fruit" category so you can generate a report for just that category, or to add a "Fruit" tag to Grocery Tax transactions when they are for fruit so you can filter a Grocery Tax category report to only include transactions with the Fruit tag.

jsquare

Hi Jon,

Thanks for taking the time to respond. That's too bad - seems like an oversight, but, the silver lining here is that I'm not losing my mind. I guess going forwards, I'll make sure to tag things.

Cheers and thanks again,
J

RickO

This seems like a perfect use for tags. Make a tag "Tax". Then in your split transaction you'd have two lines both with Category Groceries:Fruit. The first line with be the cost of the fruit with not Tag attached. The second line would be the tax and would have the Tag "Tax" in addition to Category Groceries:Fruit. Then it's easy to pull up a report for each category showing only the ones that were tagged "Tax". Similar to what Jon suggested but in reverse.

jacobs

Or, to add one possible small refinement, you could take your existing Taxes:Grocery Tax category and add sub-categories to that for Fruit, Vegetables, Cups & Supplies, etc. That would enable you to report on the overall category of tax, on the sub-category of Tax:Grocery Tax, and on the sub-sub-categories of Fruit, Vegetables, etc., as needed.

One other thought for what you can do for the past year, although it's a little messy and I'd recommend adopting sub-categories or tags going forward… Select All Transactions in the left sidebar (unless all your spending some from a single account, in which case you should select that). In the Search box, enter Taxes:Grocery, and set the date range to last year. This will select all transactions which used that category last year. Select all the transactions and do File > Export > Register Transactions to CSV files, and open the CSV file in your spreadsheet of choice. You'll see that each split line appears on its own row in the spreadsheet. So now you can sort by the category column to get all the Taxes:Groceries:Fruit split lines together. Delete everything else, clean it up, and you've got a report of taxes on fruit to give your accountant! 😀 As I said, it's a bit messy, especially if you have a lot of sub-categories to report on, but it could get you what you need for 2023, and then you can refine your categories and/or use Tags for 2024 transactions.

jsquare

Thanks, guys!! It seems like the best way forward is to use tags - I've found a hack for doing my taxes for 2023… but I've already started tagging things for next year. I really appreciate your responses!

Cheers,

J