Quicken Business and personal functionality for a non businessman

boyerfam

I have been using Quicken for 20 years of so for my personal bank accounts. Last year I started a business, and started using Business and Personal. This year, I started generating invoices in quicken. When I receive an invoice payment in quicken it shows as a negative, and when I go to the business tab, my profit/loss does not seem to show that I have any income. Do I have something set up wrong, or am I not looking at the paid invoices correctly? (In my mind, I perform a service, invoice for my work, and get paid. To me that should show as income)

UKR

The way they designed the Quicken Customer Invoice and Vendor Invoice processes, all invoice-related transactions are supposed to be entered directly into the respective Invoice account register:

• You create a customer invoice transaction
• You receive a payment for an invoice and deposit it into a banking account
• You record refunds or credits or finance charges

That's the old fashioned pre-Internet, pre-direct deposit, pre-PayPal, etc. method.
When you directly deposit customer payments into checking, credit card or PayPal accounts and record them as transfers into the Customer Invoice account register, these transactions will appear in the invoice register as refunds or credits and will not mark invoices as paid.
So, it's better to record payments the old fashioned way, using the New Customer Payment transaction dialog before you accept a downloaded payment deposit in a bank account. Now you can match the downloaded transactions to the recorded payments.

It is assumed that all your invoice line items are categorized to appropriate Schedule C tax line items. Payments you receive are recorded as transfers to the bank accounts.
All your customer invoices also need to be tagged correctly to the respective business tag.

By default, income or expenses are recognized using the Cash method, when you create an invoice, not when you receive payment (unless you change to the Accrual method).

In Manage Business Information, your business should be recorded with a proper business name and business tag. One of the businesses, if you have more than one, needs to be marked as the Default Business so that other untagged business-related transactions (e.g., business expense charges made on a credit card (business or private)) can be counted properly.