"Treat Categorized Transfers As" preference toggle... [Edited]

ImacAttack

Let me preface this by saying that I am aware of the fact that from an accounting and bookkeeping perspective, a Transfer is neither and Income nor an Expense.

That said, it is beyond frustrating that Quicken continues to allow the ability to assign a Category to Transfers per transaction but NOT have those transaction properly total up as Categories in the Budgets or Reports. It begs the question — why allow it if it can't be reported on?

I have read many threads where people seem to indicate that the ability to assign a Category to a Transfer is not a "thing" that should ever have been allowed in the first place. I couldn't disagree more. The prime benefit of personal finance software should be in it's ability to perform mutliple logical processes. If a user can create something Excel/Google Sheets, then there is no reason that Quicken shouldn't be able to automate this so that we don't have to use two tools. I pay for Quicken to make thing simpler, not to add more steps.

While I can imagine that the Software Engineers and Product Managers within Quicken are likely to have heated debates about this issue, it seems to be that a simple solution is to offer up the option to the user. Just provide a toggle in in Budgeting tool and the Report tool that says:

• Treat Categorized Transfers as: [Option: Categories/Transfers]

If the user says Categories, then those transactions get totaled by their Category. If they choose Transfers, then they get totaled as Transfers. Note that this would be a separate preference from "Include Transfers".

Quicken Classic: Version 7.8.2 (Build 708.53926.100)

Mac OS: 13.6.7

[Edit - Corrected Typos]

NotACPA

You are apparently, from the version you referenced, running QMac … but you posted in a QWin forum. QWin doesn't allow categories to be assigned to transfers.

I'll ask a Mod to move this to a QMac thread.

ImacAttack

Typo corrections:

subject line: "treat" not "tread"

first sentence: "bookkeeping perspective" not "bookkeeping expense"

ImacAttack

Thank you, not sure how that happened. LOL.

jacobs

The post has now been moved to a Quicken Mac section. 😀

As noted above, Quicken Windows does not allow transfers to have a category, or visa versa. In Quicken Mac, it is still possible due to some carryover of code from close to 15 years ago in the original Quicken Essentials for Mac, which provided the code base for the modern Quicken Mac 5 years later. In Quicken Essentials, there were no investment accounts, and you couldn't include transfers in reports or budgets, so the developers allowed transfers to have categories in order to be functional, even though it violated the rules of accounting.

Quicken Mac, when it was released in 2014, included investment accounts, and over the years of development, it added the ability to include transfers in reports and in budgets. With those needs filled, the development team said they would remove the capability to assign a category to a transfer transaction. The product manager reported this had been decided at "the highest levels" of Quicken (e.g. it wasn't just a decision by a few developers). But for whatever reason, the removal of the old code hasn't happened. My guess as to why: (a) it never seemed as pressing a priority as adding other needed features, and (b) designing and coding a solution for people who may have dozens or hundreds of such transactions in their database is likely a bit of a difficult problem to solve.

I guess I'm wondering what "beyond frustrating" problem it's posing for you. If you don't assign a category to a transfer, you can include transfers selectively in both reports and budgets. Aside from these transfer transacitons not appearing alphabetically with categories, it should achieve what anyone needs if they want to look at things from the cash flow perspective of viewing a transfer as an expense (or income).

My hope is that the developers will come back to this issue at some point and close the loophole once and for all. I certainly wouldn't be in favor of them investing time into creating new options for transfers to be income/expenses, and having to recode reports and budgets to allow for that. Unless I can see a use case for why it should be allowed. (Even then, because Quicken Windows doesn't support it, and I'm guessing Quicken Mobile doesn't support it, I think it's highly unlikely that they'd build something opposite for Quicken Mac.)

ImacAttack

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20449400#Comment_20449400

Thanks for the thoughtful response @jacobs , your instincts are correct. What is "beyond frustrating" is that the interface allows one thing (categorized transfers) while simultaneously disabling the ability to Budget and Report against those categories.

It really comes down to preferences of how to organize the Budget tool and the Reports. I've been an avid Quicken user for at least 25 years. Started on Windows in the 90s and then moved to Essentials on the mac and when Essentials had the ability to report against categorized transfers, it was fantastic. It was the best of all worlds. I could categorize all outbound transfers as as a subcategory of "savings" and then all of those transactions would sum in the appropriate categories at the Reporting level and the Budget level. Now, us mac users apparently, are stuck in a situation where we are allowed to create those categories and allowed to enter transactions against those categories but not Report and Budget against them. I wouldn't call this a loophole, but a bug: a bug that is allowing us to create the categories this way, or a bug that is preventing us from reporting and budgeting against them.

I understand that functionally, I could "simply" choose to treat them all as non categorized transfers, but bear in mind that I have years and years of transactions that have always been categorized.

I too hope that the developers come back to this but my personal preference and request still stands. If, as you say, there is no mathematical difference then I don't see why it should be so difficult within the product team to allow a user preference of how to report against categorized transfers.

Obviously there is another solution to this: allow transfers to be grouped and expanded. Why that hasn't happened is also beyond me.

Chris_QPW

@jacobs If I remember correctly (based on the early forum posts) Quicken Mac Essentials didn't have "linked transfers". So, in reality it only had categories, and one that was built-in was "Transfers".

But even in that case there is one thing that is "universal" and fundamentally important. No matter how it is done, you should never have both.

Why?

Because if you have both you will run into problems with "double counting", and that is the accounting principal that any accounting program should never violate.

This is one of the cases where past mistakes, come to bite you. They had people using the Transfer category, and now they wanted to support linked transfers. They didn't feel that at the time they could force people to the new system and put in both. Personally, I think it was a BIG mistake that at that time they didn't ensure that it was one or the other.

And also thinking back to when the Quicken Mac developer "realized/announced" that they would go away for allowing this I think it corresponds to when they started supporting (linked) transfers in budgets and such. I'm sure they were finding that allowing both would start getting into the problem of double counting a given transaction.

ImacAttack

I wholle heartedly support the notion that double-counting is bad, which is why - IMHO - the user toggle is the solution. It would allow the user to choose how to report.

In my view, the problem comes down to how to tread a transaction and how to report on the transaction. Those two things are different but Quicken is forcing them to be the same. To expand a bit, here's the benefit that Categorized transfers previously allowed (and that I now have to manually recreate in a third party app).

I have 10 outbound account that I make transfers to from my checking. Some of those transactions fit a particularl category of monthly outbound spending (ie Saving) while some of them fit another (ie Health). Because the Reporting tool treats them all as "Transfers" then I can not report on how much I am spending on Saving vs. Health without entering the information in another tool.

jacobs

I have 10 outbound account that I make transfers to from my checking. Some of those transactions fit a particularl category of monthly outbound spending (ie Saving) while some of them fit another (ie Health). Because the Reporting tool treats them all as "Transfers" then I can not report on how much I am spending on Saving vs. Health without entering the information in another tool.

I understand the need to see them separately, but that's not that way reports work. If you include those Transfers in a Transaction report, it will show the transactions to each account, with a heading and subtotal, not different than if they were categories. They aren't lumped together in one pile called Transfers. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something, but how does this not address what you're wanting to see?

ImacAttack

I keep attempting to post a comment but it keeps disapearing every time. Here's attempt #3.

I actually have 13 outbound accounts (including investment accounts). Those outbound transfers do in fact show up as one list at the bottom of the report. But from a budget management perspective those accounts are NOT the same category. Some of them are discretionary, some of them are fixed, and some are other. I can set up categories to track them that way, but I can't report on them that way without running a report and then manually entering the values in a third party app. Sure, the sum total of my income and expenses are the same, but management of them to make decision is very different.

ImacAttack

The inability to Group and/or subgroup Transfers is really the problem. Here's my 10 accounts, in order:

• Cushion Savings (a credit union account)
• Vacation
• Car
• Home Improvement
• Health
• Unemployment Reserves
• Senior Care
• Holiday Savings
• 401K
• 403B

And here's a very rudimentary example of how I would like be able to report/group against them

Short Term Savings

• Car
• Vacation
• Holiday Savings

Mid Term Savings

• Cushion Savings
• Home Improvement
• Health

Long Term Savings

• Health
• 401K
• 403B

And here's why it matters, beyond just organizing. When planning/budgeting, some of those accounts are discrentionary and some are fixed. So, when I need to make adjustments to discretionary spending in my budget plannign process, then I go to all the categories and I update those numbers, and they all subtotal up to the Discretionary category. With categorized transfers, I can include Car, Vacation, and Holiday Savings as a subcategory of Discretionary Spending and if I made adjustments to them then the totals would all roll up. As it stand now, that's not possible.

ImacAttack

to moderator — having refresh problems. Please delete last post.

Quicken Kristina

Hello @ImacAttack,

Deleted the last post, per your request.

Based on one of your earlier posts, I don't think you're running into a refresh issue. If you post something and it immediately vanishes, that usually means the post has been randomly flagged by the spam filter and will re-appear once a moderator reviews/approves it.

I hope this helps!

ImacAttack

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20449417#Comment_20449417

Thanks Christina. I suspect there may be one or two in the queue then that are being reviewed. Feel free to delete them. Not intending to spam the system.

(Might I request a user feedback alert that informs the user that the comment is being reviewed?)

jacobs

I actually have 13 outbound accounts (including investment accounts). Those outbound transfers do in fact show up as one list at the bottom of the report.

Let's take a step back: what report are you using? Because that's not the way it appears in a Transaction report for me. Here's a piece of a transaction report where I've told it to include all transfers (I blocked out the account names). You can see it shows each To and From account individually, with the transaction(s), and when there's more than one transaction for an account, it provides a subtotal line for that account.

It sounds like you must be doing something different and not seeing this. Are you using the old Category Summary report (under "Other" reports)? That report does lump all the transfers together.

If so, I've got good news and bad news. 😉 The bad news, which will probably make you scream: this is another carry-over from Quicken Essentials which the developers have said they will remove from the program eventually — but haven't gotten to. tThe good news: they re-built most of the old Essentials reports in 2017 and later; the Transaction, Summary, Comparison, Net Worth and most of the Tax reports use the "modern" reports engine. Only the few reports in "Other" and "Net Worth Over Time" are the old carry overs. Anything you could do in the old Category Summary report can be done, better, in the modern reports.

jacobs

I posted my reply above before seeing your latest post. It's now clearer to me that you're using transfers for a form of envelope budgeting. Quicken Mac wasn't designed for this, so you're running into some issue trying to pound a square peg into a round hole. Quicken Mac, and the way it handles transfers, is built around each account in Quicken mirroring an actual account in the real world — checking, savings, retirement, loan, etc. I'm not sure how you're reconciling your real accounts if you're transferring money to envelope accounts which aren't real, but I know users have come up with creative ways of trying to do this even though the program isn't designed for it. The real solution you need, I think, is actual envelope budgeting capabilities. And the good news on that front is that users have asked for it over the years, and the developers have marked it as a "Planned" feature for the future.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7445030/envelope-budgeting-q-mac-9-merged-vote

NotACPA

@jacob It also appears to me that what the OP calls "accounts" are actually categories (in Q terminology). It's not evident that several of those have "real world" counterparts, e.g. "Home Improvement".

ImacAttack

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20449420#Comment_20449420

We're actually talking about the same report. But here's I think a better example that shows the problem. This is from the Budget tool. The greenbox represents Categorized Transfers that can be setup but are not reported against, while the red box represents Accounts that can be reported but not grouped.

ImacAttack

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20449421#Comment_20449421

No, they're all real accounts. :) But, functionally, yes they are categorized and planned like envelope budgeting.

jacobs

So you have 10 separate saving accounts, and move money into each of these accounts until you spend for the purpose? See people doing this on paper, but not in the "real world". 😉

I really don't think there's any chance the developers will double-down on allowing categorized transfers, for all the reasons I've given in previous posts. This is what the former Quicken Mac product manager said in 2020:

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 but haven't done it yet because we needed to add the advanced transfer, adjustment and cash flow capabilities we just added in 5.13 and 5.14.  We're now working on improving Transfer and mortgage payment support in budgets.  Once this is complete, we will start the process of removing the ability to add a category to a transfer.

and later…

Quicken Mac theoretically does support transfers on categories but we're going to remove that capability in the not too distant future because it's not supported by the Quicken Cloud and Quicken Windows.  I can see your argument that it would be useful and Quicken Windows supports tax line items on transfer transactions to support tax reporting which is a kind of category on a transfer so there's a use case. However, the bottom line is the Mac product must line up with the rest of the Quicken ecosystem. This decision was made at the highest levels of our company so it's not going to be revisited.

So it's fine for you to advocate for what you think would serve you in this Idea request, and all I can do is share why I don't think it will happen. I think you'd be better off trying to rethink what you do in the real world and how to represent it in Quicken. The developers have previously indicated they don't plan to support users building the sidebar however they want, so I think it's unlikely you'll be able to create custom sub-categories of savings account the way you've done with categories. Perhaps once they release an envelope budgeting feature, you'll find you don't need all the separate real-world savings accounts and can do the tracking of funds for each purpose in Quicken rather than actually moving money between accounts.

Best wishes!

ImacAttack

TBH, I can't understand how anyone can not NOT budget in this way. ie — how does someone mentally set aside money that isn't actually set aside.

And with that context, I am wondering how others are handling envelope budgeting within Quicken.

jacobs

I'm not an envelope budget person, so I hope some other people will chime in. I think some people use actual envelopes with cash to save for thing like vacations, car care, and of course savings. I think many others do it on paper, or in Quicken; if you have $2,000 in your savings account, you can easily allocate that into 3 or 5 or 10 budget categories, making adjustments to pull from one and add to another as you go along.

The other approach is to create a budget for a year based on expected income and expenses (including savings). You initially adjust your budgeted expenses to not include income; as they year goes along, you monitor your actual income and expenses versus what you budgeted. If your spending moves over, you make adjustments to other expense categories to get the bottom line back to zero. This has been more my approach, since it's also what I had to do with business budgets at work.

And if your finances aren't so tight that you have to stick to a budget to make it through the month or year, you may be one who does a budget to try to guesstimate how things will go and keep an eye on your spending, without making adjustments and being concerned about needing to precisely keep spending matching income.

ImacAttack

Here's a couple other use case for categorized transfers (all of which related to reporting).

Example 1:

Lets say I have a recurring mortgage payment that is $2500 and car payment that is $500 the payments are made from my checking account and tied to loans that are also tarcked in Quicken. Each transaction has a set of splits as follows

• Mortgage (total -$2500)
  • Principal - $1000 (which shows as a credit on the Mortage)
  • Interest - $1000
  • Escrow -$500
• Car Payment (total -$500)
  • Principal (-$350)
  • Interest (-$150)

In this scenario, it is is easy enough to mentally forecast spending $2500/month for the mortgage and $500 for the car, but the issue comes to reporting. If I do not have Categorized Transfers, then I have to turn Transfers On in the report would show up as:

• Mortgage (total $-1500)
  • Interest - $1000.00
  • Escrow -$500
• Car Payment (total -$150)
  • Interest (-150)
• Transfers (total: $1350)
  • Transfer To: Mortgage: -$1000.00
  • Transfer to: Car Loan: -$350

By comparison, with categorized transfers, those expenses would be reported exactly as they are budgeted and transacted.

• Mortgage (total -$2500)
  • Principal - $1000
  • Interest - $1000
  • Escrow -$500
• Car Payment (total -$500)
  • Principal (-$350)
  • Interest (-$150)

Obviously the totals are the same, but the latter is much much much cleaner when trying to determine how much was spent on a mortgage payment and car payment. Obviously this is a simple example that doesn't all of ther categories of the report, but the idea still holds. One method reports exactly as entered, and the other does not.

Example 2:

Lets say I have on "bulk savings" account that I send regular amounts to each month for multiple purposes (in a psuedo envelope budget method). Each month I set aside the following:

• $100 for bike savings
• $100 for car savings
• $50 for dental costs
• $75 for vacation

Each of those line items represents a discreet transfer from one account to a single account. In the absence of categorized transfers, then those expense would simply show up as:

• Transfers
  • To Savings: $325

Where as if I have Categorized Transfers, then it would show up as:

• Savings ($325)
  • Bike Savings (-$100)
  • Car Savings (-$100)
  • Dental Savings ($-50)
  • Vacation Savings ($-75)

Again, the totals are the same, but the Categorized Transfer method is a much more accurate discriptoin of how I actually spent my money that month. This is particularly helpful determining when and how things go over or under. ie — If I make an additional $50 contribution to Bike Savings one month because I worked a bunch of overtime, then I want to know that I contributed a total of $150 to the bike while the other categories remained the same.

I'll reiterate that this methodology is contingent on NOT double counting. Ie — categorized transfers should only be used if the external tranfer account is NOT turned on. At that moment, it is possible to double report. More importantly, there isn't any granularity to select which accounts do or do not get reported. Its either all transfers or none. There is no way, by example, to show transfers for an Investment account while turning off transfers to the Mortgage account.

Which is why, in my view, a toggle of "treat categorized transfers as" would solve the issue for all potential reporting scenarios.

jacobs

I appreciate the time you're taking to detail this. It seems to me your need comes down mostly to envelope budgeting, which would allow you to group your transfers into the discrete buckets of your choosing for budgeting purposes. I've explained why categorized transfers simply are not going to happen, according to the folks at Quicken, but envelope budgeting will. You can continue to state your case, but I think you're tilting at windmills here.

In your first example, do you not have a separate account for your Escrow? That might help clean up a few things. Each month, your mortgage payment would be a split between a transfer to the loan account (principal), a transfer to the escrow account, and interest expense. When your taxes and insurance are paid by the mortgage company, you'd record those as expense transactions in your escrow account, so those expenses would be properly categorized and your escrow balance would be properly decreased.

In your second example, if I understand correctly, you transfer a single $325 transfer to your Savings account which you earmark for 4 different purposes. If you enter one real-world transaction for a $325 transfer, and record four splits splits…

… then they appear individually in a report:

Another alternative you might play around with is using Tags for each of your envelope budgeting areas. Then you might be able to use a report by Tags to see your savings inout and spending.

These are just suggestions to see if you can come up with an approach to adapt the budgeting you want to do within the way Quicken is designed to work. Hopefully whenever they come up with an envelope budgeting feature (just a guess, but I wouldn't expect to see that until sometime next year), it will simplify your record-keeping.

ImacAttack

Totally fine to tilt at windmills here. :)

I really do think that the Q for Mac method is the best of all worlds as it lets user track how they spend money (categories) as well as where that money goes (transfers).

Thanks for the time to listen and offer suggestions. I'll continue to pursue options.