Budget report and transfers impacting income and expenses

Michael R

Has anyone figured out how to reflect accurate income and expenses in your budget report to exclude unwanted transfers booking as income or expenses? It makes the report virtually useless. i have messed with this for three or four years with no success. There must be a work-around to reflect correct actual income and actual expenses by reclassifying the transfers as another type of transaction or turning on or off some kind of filter in the program.

My broker just transferred $55,000 from my IRA to another Wells Fargo account. It created $55,000 in income and the same in expenses. It is so frustrating.

I am a fairly advanced user and have changed including and excluding transfers and can't get it to reflect anything close to accurate.

Thanks

UKR

How exactly was that transfer performed by the broker? Did they transfer actual shares to the new broker or did they sell shares and transfer all cash only?

How did you record this transfer in Quicken? Did you rely on downloaded transactions from both brokerages using Sell and Buy transactions? Or did you record the transfer using the dialog "Shares transferred between accounts"?

Are both accounts defined as "Tax deferred" in Quicken or did you really withdraw money from an IRA to a taxable account?

Jim_Harman

For reference, here is my answer to this question when you asked it in another thread earlier today

This depends on which report you are using and whether you are concerned about the tax implications of this move. Strictly speaking, moving money from one account to another is neither income nor an expense. Moving money from an IRA account may be a taxable event.

If you want to treat distributions from an investing account as income for reporting purposes, you can customize the Income and Expense by Category report so that it includes the "spending" account that receives the transfer but does not include the investing account. Then the investing account will be listed in the Income section of the report as FROM <account-name>.

If you are using the Banking > Cash flow report, again you should include the receiving account but not the source account, and on the Advanced tab next to Transfers, select "Exclude internal". The terminology is confusing, but "Exclude Internal" tells the report to ignore transfers between accounts that are selected for the report (payments from your checking account to a credit card account for example) but to include transfers between the selected accounts and other accounts.

Most other reports have different default settings, but they work the same way: Include the "spending" accounts but not the source account, and on the Advanced tab set Transfers to "Exclude internal". If the report has an Organization setting on the Advanced tab, set it to “Cash Flow Basis”.

You can control which transfers are included in your budget by clicking on Manage Budget Categories on the Budget page and making selections in the Transfers In and Transfers Out sections. These selections will affect the Budget reports.