How do I get quicken to separate transactions according to each business, instead of lumping them to

rhalexda

I have two businesses, with separate tags for each business. How do I get quicken to separate transactions according to each business, instead of lumping them together under each category?

RalphC

Make unique categories for each business.

Jim_Harman

You can separate transactions for multiple businesses by using Business Tags.

See this Help article for more information

https://info.quicken.com/win/tell-me-about-how-tags-work-with-businesses

NotACPA

@rhalexda Where exactly are you seeing this "lumping". If you display your category list, yes all the transactions (both businesses) for Category X will be included in the count of that category.

But if you use Jim Harmon's suggestion of Business tags, the reports should be correct.

And, I'd advise against duplicate categories. Serious maintenance hassle keeping track of them. And besides, at times you might want to actually see the total paid for, say, Electricity.

UKR

If you have set up Business Tags for your individual businesses, you can use business-related views to get separate views and reports by business. For example:

rhalexda

I created a separate business and business tag for my second business. But Quicken refuses to allocate my income and expenses separately for the two separate businesses, despite the different business tags! Rather, it simply lists the IRS 1040 CATEGORIES, and lumps both business income & expenses under the same categories, rather than separating the business income and expenses categories according to the two separate businesses.

This is a MAJOR PROBLEM, because Quicken then uploads my info into Turbo Tax as ONE SCHEDULE C!!! Rather than a two Schedule C's—one for each business tag!! In order to get two separate Schedule C's—one for each business, I would have to ignore the upload from Quicken, and ENTER ALL OF THE INFORMATION MANUALLY TO CREATE A SEPARATE SCHEDULE C FOR EACH BUSINESS! Even though I have tagged each income and expense in Quicken with the appropriate business tag!

By contrast, my Rental houses' income and expenses are properly allocated to each particular house, determined by the relevant house tag. I just want the same thing for my two businesses.

For example, despite that I have tagged each deductible Form 1040 expense with the appropriate business tag, Quicken filters the BUSINESS income and expenses only by CATEGORIES, and includes both businesses under the CATEGORIES.

So, I want to print a separate Schedule C for each of the two businesses. But Quicken will not separate the income and expenses into my two businesses, but rather lumps both business income and expenses into ONE Schedule C, ignoring the separate business tags and instead lumping both businesses together under the various categories!

I thought that maybe I had not correctly created the second business and second business tag... So I had a Quicken rep. help me properly create a THIRD business and third business tag—just to experiment. But the result was the same. Quicken ignored the newly-created third business tag, and lumped all the three business income and expenses willy-nilly under the various CATEGORIES, rather than allocate the various income and expenses according to the separate business tags!

Quicken refuses to allocate income and expenses according to each separate business, determined by the appropriate business tag. Unlike my rental properties, which allocate rents and expenses separately according to the unique house tag, Quicken lumps both BUSINESS incomes and expenses together under the various categories, ignoring the separate business tags!!!

A Quicken Rep. helped me separate the income and expenditures for each business by excluding one or the other business tag, and create separate reports for each business, and printing it. But that has no effect on uploading the software info into Turbo Tax! And unless I can get Quicken itself to separate the income and expenses according to each business, I would have to manually create two separate Schedule C's in Turbo Tax, by hand! That defeats the purpose of uploading the software into Turbo Tax!!!!

HELP!!

rhalexda

BTW, I am focusing on the Tax Schedule Report, created by Quicken, which previews how and what will be uploaded into Turbo Tax.

NotACPA

Do your businesses file their own tax returns? OR, are they included on your tax return?

If the former, they should have their own Q data file. Any Q data file should contain ALL of the financial info for a tax entity and ONLY that tax entity.

If the latter, then they properly belong on your tax report as 1040 income as you and the businesses are a single tax entity.

Use the business reports to see the info for the individual businesses.

Jim_Harman

The instructions for Line A of the Schedule C instructions say,

If you owned more than one business, complete a separate Schedule C for each business.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040sc.pdf

Quicken's Business reports have a Schedule C report. Does that separate out your businesses? Does the Tax Schedule report under Business generate separate Schedule C data for your businesses?

UKR

Please be sure that, wherever possible, all business-related transactions originate in the Customer Invoices (A/R) or Vendor Invoices (A/P) accounts: create Customer or Vendor Invoices, receive customer payment, make vendor payment, etc.
In the customer or vendor invoices dialogs you need to select the correct business name for the new transactions.

If you create business transactions in cash, checking or credit card accounts (e.g., purchase of Office Supplies at Office Max), please ensure that each of these transactions are tagged with the respective Business Tag name.
Using the Tag name, the Tax Schedule and Tax Summary reports will be able to keep the business separate.
The same applies to transferring tax data to your Income Tax Software which, in turn, should be able to create separate Schedule C forms based on business tag.

rhalexda

Both businesses are pass-thru LLC's, so I file them on my individual form 1040. I just opened business accounts for each business halfway through the year. Prior to that everything went into and out of my personal account. That's no problem because I categorize the expenditures according to deductible categories.

I understand that each business needs its own Sch. C. But that's the problem. Quicken will not separate the expenditures according to the business tags. It is as if Quicken is ignoring the business tags entirely, and lumps both business expenditures together under the categories, rather than separating the expenditures according to the business tag.

volvogirl

When you added the second business and tag did you go back and add a new tag on all the first business transactions? You said… I created a separate business and business tag for my second business. What about the first existing business?

Jim_Harman

I may be repeating some things you have explained previously, but just to be clear:

Quicken does not appear to have built-in Categories for business income and expenses, so you must create these yourself and add appropriate Schedule C line items to them. Have you been using these Categories for your business income and expenses?

And does it also ignore the Business tags you have set up in the Business reports, including the Business > Schedule C Report and the Business > Tax Schedule report? As @volvogirl says, if you have more than one business, you must assign the appropriate business tag to each business. If you only have one tag but more than one business, it appears that it will lump the untagged transactions together with the one tag you have set up

I set up a file with 2 businesses and 2 Business Categories, simply called Business Income and Business Expenses. The business tags are My Dog Walking and My Pet Sitting and the Schedule C report looks like this:

By default the businesses are combined into one Schedule C report but each business is broken out with [square brackets] around its Tag. Does your Schedule C report look like this? I suppose it would be nicer if Quicken subtotaled the Schedule C report by business tag.

In your Schedule C report if you customize it to just select one of your Business tags, does it just show that business? I assume that is what the Quicken rep did with you.

If your reports look like this and you export to TurboTax, are you saying that it creates one combined Schedule C and not one for each of your businesses? If so, I agree that that would at least partly defeat the purpose of business tags.

By the way, I don't try to export directly from Quicken to TurboTax because Quicken's tax data is incomplete. Rather than export, import, and make corrections, I prefer to enter everything into TurboTax manually.

Chris_QPW

As I see it this is the real complaint:

This is a MAJOR PROBLEM, because Quicken then uploads my info into Turbo Tax as ONE SCHEDULE C!!! Rather than a two Schedule C's—one for each business tag!! In order to get two separate Schedule C's—one for each business, I would have to ignore the upload from Quicken, and ENTER ALL OF THE INFORMATION MANUALLY TO CREATE A SEPARATE SCHEDULE C FOR EACH BUSINESS!

In Quicken one can definitely separate these out into two reports, and such. It isn't Quicken that is ignoring the business tags it is TurboTax. Or maybe even that the business tags aren't in the information transferred. Since we can't see what is actually being exported/imported it is hard to say which is the case, but I suspect that the information isn't in the export, when they created the export, they didn't consider that someone would be using one data file for multiple businesses that would be filed on multiple Schedule Cs.

My suggestion would be to not import these using the Quicken to TurboTax, but instead do it with exporting and importing using a TFX file.

Jim_Harman

It's a TXF file that is exported, right?

I took a look at the TXF file generated by my test file, and I see

V042
AQuicken Classic Business & Personal R60
D 1/29/2025
^
TD
N293
C1
L1
$123.45
X 1/28/2025 Business Checking Donald Duck Walking Pluto Business Income
^
TS
N293
C1
L1
$123.45
^
TD
N301
C1
L1
$-12.34
X 1/28/2025 Business Checking Petco Treats Business Expens
^
TS
N301
C1
L1
$-12.34
^
TD
N293
C2
L1
$45.67
X 1/28/2025 Business Checking Mickey Mouse Business Income
^
TS
N293
C2
L1
$45.67

I am guessing here, but it would appear that N293 is Schedule C income and N301 is a Schedule C expense line.

If C1 and C2 indicate Copy 1 and Copy 2 of Schedule C, then the information needed to produce two Schedule Cs is present in the TXF file.

Perhaps you need to set up both Schedule Cs in TurboTax before importing.

Jim_Harman

Also when you import into TurboTax, what format are you trying to use? I see that TT Deluxe 2024 supports the following:

mshiggins

@Jim_Harman can you share a pick of the Edit Tag dialog for one of your businesses?

Jim_Harman

This is the dialog that is displayed when you select Business > Manage business information from the top Quicken menu then select the pet sitting business and click on Edit.

Note that My Pet Sitting is selected as the "Default Business". Apparently this means that any untagged business transactions will be assigned to that business.

mshiggins

Where is the Copy 1 / Copy 2 info specified? Isn’t that the key to getting two different Schedule C copies?

Jim_Harman

If you look at the listing of the TXF file I posted this morning, you will see that the first 2 entries have "C1" which I think says they should be on Copy 1 of Sched. C and the 3rd entry has "C2" which I think indicates Copy 2.

A reference for the TXF format is here

https://taxdataexchange.org/docs/txf/v042/index.html

It looks like I never posted the 3 original transactions in my test file, which are entered in a business checking account:. Here they are:

It is not clear to me how TurboTax is supposed to associate the business name and other information for each business on its Sched. Cs with a C1 or C2 in the TXF file.

mshiggins

This is the edit tag dialog with the Copy number field that gets used to separate items into their own copy of a tax schedule.