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BUG: Categories for transfers no longer working

Shelster

For years, I have been using both the transfer and the category fields for certain transactions.

Use case: I transfer $X monthly from my Personal account to my House Account for mortgage. I need to code that the transfer was for that purpose and track the total contributions for all other household members, whose personal accounts are external to the Quicken file.

I noted that my Transactions by Category report for 2020 shows me being one payment short and the other person having made one extra. I had inadvertently credited a single transfer made in 2020 to another person. My efforts to fix this have been abortive. As soon as I choose a category, the transfer field is blanked. These are two separate fields. Why is it that both cannot both be populated simultaneously?

I'd like to add that I tried to test using a "correctly-coded" above-shown 2/4/20 transaction downloaded via Quicken desktop app circa mid 2020. Modifying either the transfer or the category field prompts for deletion of the corresponding transfer in the target register, with the same dialogue as above.

In this new era of Quicken, is there a good procedure for matching up transfers between accounts that also allows the transfer to be assigned a category?

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Comments

jacobs

@Shelster The short answer is that transacitons should have a category or a transfer but not both. If you try to enter both, it depends on the order you enter the fields whether Quicken will accept it. If you select an account in the Transfer field first, and then try to enter a Category it will blank the Transfer field; if you enter a Category first and then enter an account in the Transfer field, Quicken will accept it — but it will cause problems.

I'll offer some background, if you're interested… In accounting, there are assets, liabilities, income and expenses, and a transaction can move money between any two. In standard accounting programs, assets, liabilities, income and expenses are all "accounts", and every transaction consists of an equal and opposite amount, a debit and a credit, for any two accounts — what is known as double-entry bookkeeping. For instance, a purchase typically reduces cash and increases an expense; a purchase could also reduce cash and increase an asset; a deposit could increase cash and increase income, or increase cash and decrease a liability. In Quicken, assets and liabilities are called "accounts" so they are reflections of real-world bank, credit card, loan, etc. accounts, while income and expenses are represented by categories. Still, the fundamental rules of accounting exist: money can move between two accounts as a transfer transaction — such as a payment from checking to a credit card; or money can move between an asset/liability and an income/expense as a categorized transaction — such as a credit card purchase of groceries which increases the credit card liability account and increases groceries expense. But creating a transaction which affects two accounts and a category isn't a valid accounting transaction, which is why the developers have said it will go away at some point.

So why does this even exist in Quicken? It goes back to the 2010-era Quicken Essentials program, the first release of the re-written Quicken for Macintosh. That program was incomplete and very limited, which led many Mac users not to use it; it wasn't until it was revamped and released in 2014 as Quicken for Mac that we got a more feature-complete program, which has continued to evolve and improve over the past decade. In the original Quicken Essentials, there were no investment accounts, and reports could not include transfers, so the code allowed the transfer + category transaction. Over time, the reports and budget features were built out, and capabilities were added to allow users to optionally include transfers for cash-flow purposes; the intent of the developers was to then remove the flawed transfer + category transaction capability. This is what the former Quicken Mac product manager said a few years ago:

Our leadership team has decided that categories on transfers violates core accounting principals that our products should be based on and we are slowly removing this functionality from the Mac… This decision was made at the highest levels of our company so it's not going to be revisited.

I don't think anything has changed with this recently, and it bugs me that the developers have left this loophole open so it causes confusion for users. I don't know eliminating category + transfer transactions has remained on the back burner for so long; I imagine they haven't implemented it fully yet because it's a change that impacts a number of parts of the code, and they need to insure that their implementation won't ruin the records of people like you who have been doing transactions this way for years.

Sorry if that was too much information! I just didn't want to write "you shouldn't do it that way" without an explanation. 😉

Shelster

@jacobs Yes, your extensive explanation is quite helpful, albeit a disheartening reminder of the reason I abandoned Quicken after two decades of compulsive* use and then, for a second time, after giving Quicken Essentials a go.

*Yes, I was that ADD/OCD person that balanced my paycheck splits to the penny. I was filing schedules A, B Cx3, D, E, and depreciating various items for various purposes in various percentages. And was probably the only person in the USA that actually claimed the 50% of employer-reimbursed meals as taxable income. I wanted bullet-proof honest records.

I disagree with the assertion that all people trying to balance their checkbooks, investment accounts, mortgages, etc., must comply with core accounting principals as I understand what you have described.

[ accounts outside my universe ] send [ $ ] for [ reason ] to [ Quicken universe ]

[ Quicken universe ] sends [ $ ] for [ reason ] to [ outside universe ]

And yet money movements within Quicken universe can only include a destination, with no ability to assign a reason.

Consider a mortgage payment broken up into the P I T I components. Based on your explanation, all money goes to a 'P' account and the I T I components leave the universe from that account. Yes, that is proper accounting. But is that what really happens? If one is tracking all of the pennies, there is a P account, an I category, and an Escrow (E) account that pushes money out when needed to the T&I that are categories.

Why is it necessary to send the entire PITI payment to P and then move to the P account to transfer to the T&I funds to E? First, intuitively, moving money to a liability that is not actually reducing that liability seems misleading. Second, is it not simpler to have a single PITI transaction consisting of three split entries, two of which are accounts and one of which departs the universe under the auspices of "Mortgage Interest?"

Consider also the paycheck case. $X "gross pay" enters my universe and yet it's immediately split amongst various accounts ( checking account, 401k/403b, an HSA/MSA, a DependentCare Account, maybe a 457, 329, or ??? ) as well as a handful of important trackable categories such as Social Security, Med insurance, and Fed, State, and local taxes.

My head is hurting trying to imagine a world in which a register entry can either have one (and only one) transfer destination or a handful of categories but not both. I'd thought that the Accounting Professionals amongst your customers use QuickBooks and that Quicken is made for people like me who are trying to keep a handle on money flow, tracking budgets, adjusting withholdings, paying bills, monitoring investments, and facilitating tax filings. Given that there are distinct and separate fields for holding category and transfer data, what is the justification for enforcing a database rule stipulating that only one of the two can be populated?

FWIW, I was a turbotax beta tester for a number of years (until I first bailed on Quicken circa 2010). I've been on the Mac Beta list for a few years, but it seems that Quicken doesn't actually have any Mac beta products to test anymore; all I seemed to receive was invitations to test the Windows product. I received an email a few months ago saying I was being removed from the beta test group because of inactivity. I was told today that Quicken no longer has a Mac Beta team but I am welcome to test the web version.

Jon

@Shelster "My head is hurting trying to imagine a world in which a register entry can either have one (and only one) transfer destination or a handful of categories but not both."

You can do both. You can have a paycheck with some splits that are transfers and some splits that are expenses; you just cannot have an individual split line that is both. For example:

This is a paycheck with most of the net income going to my main checking account (which is where this transaction is being shown) but with money also getting deposited to my HSA, 401K, and Roth IRA (all transfers), as well as expenses for taxes, insurance, and a charitable contribution.

"I was told today that Quicken no longer has a Mac Beta team"

I don't know who told you that but they are wildly misinformed. There is an active Mac beta program, @jacobs & I are both testers in it, and there are new versions being tested & released every 2-3 months. However, the Mac & Windows beta programs are separate; it sounds like somehow you got on the wrong one (which happened to me when I signed up & I had to ask to be moved to the correct one).

Shelster

@jacobs , @Jon explicitly added a visual example of the behavior that I fear the developers are intending to remove. The ERD he put in my head makes me a bit more comfortable, and also more confident that I can find workarounds in the future for my no-splits single transaction addressed in a different thread: spawn a split when needed to capture the forbidden second field's values.

Assertions: a) Money enters or leaves universe by CATEGORY b) Money moves within universe by ACCOUNT. c) A register RECORD is comprised of [ misc fields, some of which are in table S ] AND 0 or more sub records that are child records, also stored in table S.

Any register record requiring both category and account information MUST include a split (maybe two?). The main record can contain the account info and the split contains the category info.

Is this the workaround you're both suggesting will still work after the developers follow through on enforcing the database integrity rules that we've been enjoying in their absence?

Jon

I can't make out what you're trying to assert. The basic principle that Quicken follows AFAIK is that money enters or leaves Quicken's universe in categories, and moves between accounts in its universe via transfers which do not have categories. The transaction I posted follows that principle, and I've seen no indication that Quicken is planning any changes that would make such a transaction impossible.

Shelster

@Jon Per @jacobs , " the intent of the developers was to then remove the flawed transfer + category transaction capability. " Read literally, you get one or the other. "Intent… to remove" means it hasn't happened yet. The suggestion is that it's only a matter of time before the end of my ability to get it to work as you have by entering and manipulating transactions from the "right" place.

Jon

He's talking about the ability to enter a transfer and a category on the same line. Removing that wouldn't affect the paycheck transaction I posted since it doesn't do that.

volvogirl

Seems to me you want to track a cost sharing arrangement? You can use Tags for that. Don't see anyone mentioned about using Tags. How do you enter payments made by other people that are external? Like do you deposit money from them? Or if you apply their payment to the House Account what is the other side of the Transfer? Or do you have categories set up for each person? Or Accounts setup for them?

And I can't imagine why any split transaction or Account would not balance to the penny at all. That's a given. Unless it's an investment. Then you can get out of sync with fraction shares and share prices, especially if you reinvest the dividends.

Shelster

@volvogirl There are two transfers from Fidelity accounts, one (mine) within my Quicken universe, and the other from an external account. A third transaction arrives via transfer from another bank from another owner of the House account. And a fourth is deposited via the Fidelity App's "deposit checks" feature. Historically, one renegade renter (C) has paid via hardcopy check, PayPal, Apple Pay via iPhone Message, sometimes subtracting the value of a ceded gift card from his total owed. It's a bookkeeping nightmare. I do use tags, primarily as a QA tool. Also, I find that the reports based on them are less useful.

Transactions lacking any tags are not clickable for jumping to the source register, making it difficult to add tags to those transactions without relying on a second report.
Transactions that have multiple tags are split and summarized in different sections of the report. I use tags to separate transfers from my various accounts on C's behalf from my own contributions. The "C" tag is often accompanied by "Partial Payment," "Needs Review," "Flow Through," "Make Up Missed," "Reimbursement" and/or one or two others. The tag report for C from 2018-present has thirteen different sections. Limiting this report to only those containing C doesn't restrict it only to rent, so I still need to rely on categories to check my math/bookkeeping.

With respect to "balance to the penny," the various splits on paychecks are often a few cents off as compared to the auto-filled transaction. Easy-peasy compared to the hellish scenario I've described above.

jacobs

@Shelster I'm late to reply, but what @Jon has said is correct. You absolutely can have multiple split lines in a transaction, and each split line can be a category of income or expense or a transfer to another account. But split lines can't have both a category and transfer on the same split line, just as unsplit transactions can't have a category and a transfer on the same transaction.

If you want to include a transfer in a report because, from a cash flow standpoint it feels like an expense (such as payment of mortgage principal) even though it is not, you can add selected transfers to a report with the Advanced tab. Similarly, you can add selected transfers to a budget if you want the transfer to be treated like income or expense for budget purposes.

Yes, I was that ADD/OCD person that balanced my paycheck splits to the penny.

Don't we all? 😂

Transactions lacking any tags are not clickable for jumping to the source register, making it difficult to add tags to those transactions without relying on a second report.

One quick trick, if you're not aware of it: if you have the Transfer column visible in your registers, when you hover over the transfer field a right arrow icon appears on the right side of the Transfer field; clicking this icon opens the other account in a new window and jumps you to the transaction which is the other side of the transfer.

If the transaction has a split the Transfer field will show "1 transfer" (or more); clicking the right arrow will open the split, and then clicking the right arrow in the split will open the other account in a new window and jump you to the transaction which is the other side of the transfer.