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How to use net income in reports and graphs?

sneff30

When I started using Quicken back in January I initially utilized the Paycheck Wizard to track our gross income and all deductions. I quickly realized it was blowing up our income/expenses by counting gross income instead of net and by including all of our deductions as expenses. I didn't really dive too far into it and just started tracking our net for budgeting purposes.

I've recently decided to give it another shot, and I've found that you can easily exclude specific categories from these charts and reports. However, they all use gross income. Is there a backdoor way to use net income in graphs and reports?

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splasher

You can either track gross income AND expenses or you can track net income WITHOUT expenses when dealing with a paycheck. You have to have the gross amount to have something for the expenses to subtract from, otherwise you are doubling up on the expenses.

NotACPA

It's going to be a bit of work, but I'd take a backup and then go back and edit all of those paychecks to show the withholds/deductions in each paycheck transaction.

Then, use the Paycheck Wizard to create a new memorized transaction with the full info.

sneff30

@splasher Yup, that makes sense. I don't like that the paycheck deductions are counted as expenses because, well, I don't view them as "expenses" in the same sense as I consider gas or clothes as an expense. It would be nice for the Paycheck Wizard or account register to communicate the net amount actually deposited as opposed to the gross income earned.

@NotACPA I'm not interested enough to go back and do all the work to correct them. And it seems there is no way to have reports count net income instead of gross income, so it isn't something I'm going to do moving forward. I'd like the income reports to reflect what I'm actually receiving and spending.

volvogirl

Sounds like you don't want an Income & Expense report. That is for Gross income. I think you need to look at a Cash Flow report.

volvogirl

Scratch that. The Cash Flow report also shows the Gross Income. There have been many posts asking for the Net deposit to show up somewhere. But the net amount is not a category that can be selected. It is a calculated amount of Gross-deductions.

Chris_QPW

The only place that "net income" shows up (as a single number, not the math of including both the income and expenses in a report) is in the budget. And even there you have to be careful. If you select to budget your "paycheck" (which is the net amount) and then include any of the categories that are in that paycheck, you will get some crazy results, as things are double counted.

Personally, I have never done it that way, I just include both the income and expenses in the same report and the total gives the "net".

NotACPA

@sneff30 OK, you don't want to go all the way back … so how about just fixing the paychecks for this year?