Split cellphone between business and personal: doesn't work in Quicken Business/Personal Mac

snsokstan

Quicken Classic Business and Personal MacOS sequoia 15.4 Macbook Pro M1

My cellphone+internet bill needs to be split 50% business and 50% personal. I can't do that with a split transaction when the first line is "Business". See attachment. The second line can't be configured to Personal. It will only accept a Business subcategory.

I saw the workaround in the discussion linked below but that doesn't work for Quicken Business/Personal.

Is there a way to do that? Meanwhile, I am assigning 6 months to business and 6 months to personal as a workaround but that's clunky.

Previous Quicken Community discussion here

RickO

In your screenshot, it appears you have an entry in the Business field but are using a non-business category in the Category field. Quicken doesn't allow this. You will get the following warning:

If you enter a business on a split line, Quicken requires you to use a business category (and vice versa).

However, if you use a business category on line 1, leave the business field blank on line 2 and use a non-business category on line 2, it will work as show below:

If you don't like that the subcategory names are not same between business and non-business, you can always edit them so they match. As @jacobs mentioned in the post that you linked, this does require you to have some duplicate categories that appear both under the Business Expense main category and separately as a non-business category. One reason for this is that business categories have different tax form designation options than personal categories. That's why it doesn't make sense to allow a personal category to be used in a business transactions or vice versa and why Quicken enforces this restriction.

One other note: Subcategories take on the business/personal state of the parent category. You can re-arrange the structure of the groupings of categories in the Categories Window by editing each category and changing the "Subcategory Of" field. This could be a bit of a project for a large number of categories, but it would be a one time task.