Transfer from Classic to Business & Personal
[Removed - Rant] All my carefully separated categories for my separate business have been [Removed - Language] - assigned willy-nilly to one of the businesses, automatically. The previous business category, I created, with all the carefully-created sub-categories, automatically deleted. All my carefully-separated transactions are now grouped under the default business. What about my hundreds of quickfill rules? Those are messed up too. How could Quicken have released this product with no option to assign a category to one business or another? Confirmed this with Quicken help. Only suggestion was to go in the register and manually reassign each transaction to the correct business - which I guess I now am expected to continue doing until Quicken fixes this. [Removed - Rant]
Comments
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@pvi I'm wondering if you didn't use the Category Migration tool to manage the re-assignment of your existing categories into the business categories you would have wanted?
I'm not aware of Business & Personal deleting old categories and sub-categories. (I don't use Business & Personal for my live data, but as a beta tester, I did use it quite a bit during testing.)
You might want to consider restoring from a backup just before you upgraded to Business & Personal and take another pass at integrating your data into Business & Personal, knowing what to look out for and trying to avoid the same pitfalls on a second try. Of course, some things will require changes or editing; Quicken would have no way of knowing which older transactions should belong to one business or another without you assigning them. As for categories, you previously managed multiple businesses by having categories for each, where in Business & Personal, one would typically have multiple businesses but only one set of categories which each business could use. Categories in Quicken don't belong to one business or another; categories are universal — and I don't see them changing that. But if you want to, you could still use certain categories for one business and other categories for a different business.
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19930 -
How could categories not belong to one business or another? How else would you automatically separate income and expenses from different businesses? One of the primary benefits of Quicken is the automatic assignment of categories. The entire point is to recognize transactions that are related to one business or to another, and categorize them accordingly. If both businesses' transactions are in the same category, there remains no automated mechanism to assign them to the correct business.
Yes, I looked at the migration tool, but it is subject to the same failure: there is no option to select the appropriate business when migrating, or to retain the structure of different category groups for different businesses. Even if I manage to redo the migration in a cleaner way, there's no way moving forward to assign categories to one business or to the other - according to what I've seen, and to Quicken help. So it is still a failure for multiple businesses.
The deletion of an entire category that I'd created, and the reassignment of transactions into the new "Business Expenses" category, with zero possibility of considering which business they should be assigned to, seems to have occurred automatically after I assigned one of my businesses as the "default business". But it definitely happened. A whole category group (the "old" Business Expenses) simply vanished.
Yes, my next move is to restore from the backup I made before upgrading, but there is no way to avoid these issues, since the product lacks the functionality required for proper migration into, and ongoing category assignment for, multiple business. Only options seem to be sticking with Classic, or migrating to Quickbooks. For different reasons, neither are optimal.0 -
Again, categories are not tied to a specific business in Quicken. A category is defined as business or personal, but not assigned to a particular business.
Imagine someone who has four rental properties and wants to be able to track and report on them individually and in aggregate. They wouldn't create four different sets of duplicate categories for each business; they'd use the same categories. I realize that's not the way you've been doing it using Quicken as it was designed for non-business personal finance, but I you should be able to adapt to using the same categories for different businesses or continue having separate categories for different businesses if you wish. If you do the latter, you'd have accept that Quicken doesn't "assign" a category to a business, so you might want to add something to your category names to make it clear which one you intend for which business (e.g. "Utilities-Unit A", "Utilities-Unit B" or "Unit A Utilities", "Unit B Utilities")
For the category which disappeared , I'm thinking it might have had the same name as one of Quicken's new default categories. If so, if you rename your current "Business Expenses" category to "Business Expenses-OLD", before setting up any businesses, it should survive the change to being a business category.
Also, you might want to set up your businesses without initially designating one as the default business (e.g. leave Quicken's default "My Business") until you get all your businesses defined, your categories set up, etc. Then you should be able to change the default business to one of your businesses, and delete "My Business".
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19930 -
Re: "but I you should be able to adapt to using the same categories for different businesses or continue having separate categories for different businesses if you wish."
-Using the same categories for different business is not viable, since I need to assess and report each businesses' income & expenses separately.
-Yes, I can have separate categories for different businesses, but since Quicken doesn't allow linking categories to the correct business, that work would have to be done manually, for all past and future transactions. This means the user has to incorporate a manual workaround into the workflow, for something that should be part of the core functionality. That's a failure of design.
Re the disappearing category: Quicken automatically added "(old)" to the parent category after updating - but still deleted it. This might be worked around by naming it something completely different. But still, automatically deleting categories without a confirmation prompt is another failure of design.
Re setting up businesses without designating a default: That's a good idea, but I'm not sure it's possible. I designated a default by CHANGING the default business. So there was already a default business when the update pushed.
I'd like to make it work, but still don't see that it's a viable product for tracking multiple businesses that need separate reporting.
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Reports in the Business category have a pulldown that lets you select an individual business to report on; reports outside the Business category generally don't give you any ability to filter on a business (business-related Tax reports like Schedule C and E appear to be an exception). It doesn't look like anyone has yet suggested adding that option to other reports.
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Using the same categories for different business is not viable, since I need to assess and report each businesses' income & expenses separately.
That’s what I was saying the program is built to do! Use the same categories for each business, but report on each business separately. You’re actually swimming upstream trying to use a different set of categories for every business, because the program is designed to use one set of categories for as many separate businesses as you need.
(As Jon noted, the ability to report by business only appear in the business reports, so if you mix personal and business expenses and use a non-business report, you can’t separate out individual businesses.)
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19930 -
In classic, it’s easy enough to set up custom reports for different parent categories, where parent category = individual business. It sounds like that functionality is integrated into the design of business & personal - but that is not the issue in this thread.
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How, then, do you get Quicken to assign the correct business to any given recurring transaction?
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How, then, do you get Quicken to assign the correct business to any given recurring transaction?
Aha… now we're on to a definite missing feature! 😉 Scheduled transactions do not have a field for Business, which is what would be needed for this. There is an Idea post for this, in which I noted that the developers said they are aware this is needed functionality but haven't tackled it yet as they're building the business feature set; apparently there's some complexity to it which hasn't made it an easy thing to implement. Surprisingly to me, this Idea post has gotten only 3 votes since Business & Personal was released for the Mac a little over a year ago; I would have thought users would be clamoring for this. In any case, add your vote and your voice here:
For now, when you mark a scheduled transaction as Paid or Deposited, you'll need to edit it to select the business if the transaction does not apply to your default business.
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19931 -
This missing feature is the crux of my issue, and the reason I am saying business & personal is not viable for people who need to separately track multiple businesses. It applies not only to scheduled transactions (not a feature I use), but to all transactions - and in my case, specifically to transactions downloaded from financial institutions. Those transactions are the foundation of my data set, and without the capacity to automatically assign them to the correct business, Q B&P loses its value. Perhaps one avenue for the developers is exactly what I started out seeking: allow users to assign specific businesses to individual categories. That might be turning things on their head for people who understand categories as you seem to do - but in my experience, it certainly would work. In the meantime, however, it seems I need to go back to classic, or investigate QuickBooks… and chalk up a good day of lost productivity
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It might help to understand more about your usage, and whether there are viable ways to do what you want the program to do. You have multiple businesses, obviously. How many? I'm guessing the businesses aren't separate corporations, correct? (If they were, you'd probably be best tracking them in separate Quicken data files.) Do your businesses don't have separate checking and/or credit card accounts, or do you just attribute different transactions to the different businesses? And about how many downloaded checking or credit card transactions do you have per month in total for your businesses?
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19930 -
There are two separate businesses, in unrelated industries, with different structures. For better or worse, neither has dedicated/exclusive banking accounts. I've been eager to bring invoicing under the same financial management umbrella, so I was excited when Q finally implemented that for Mac. But there are hundreds of transactions/month total, so automatic categorization is vital. In Classic, using quick fill rules to put transactions to separate, semi-parallel category buckets has worked acceptably, and provided a way to generate custom reports for each business. For B&P to work, it would have to be able to automatically assign transactions to the correct business.
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Re: "For now, when you mark a scheduled transaction as Paid or Deposited, you'll need to edit it to select the business if the transaction does not apply to your default business." In other words, "upgrading" from Classic to B&P requires a multiple-business owner to replace automated classification with an extra layer of manual review and interaction, for every business transaction. [Removed - Rant]
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When I migrated, I created separate groups of Sub-categories to Rental, for my rental business. My primary business is a Consulting business. Unfortunately on the Mac it doesn't work as well as it does in Windows. Everything for the business will default to whatever you setup as the Default business and you need to manually change it.
Another reason for separating was that my Consulting business was Schedule C and Rental was Schedule E.
There is still room for improvement in the Mac product, but overall I'm very happy to be running in Native Mac OS as opposed to running Windows in Parallels, and I like the feel better and the data is much more solid. I had a lot of data issues on Windows.
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Interesting, and thanks for that insight… Since QB&P Mac can only automatically assign transactions to the default business, could there be a workaround by using the default "Business" for my business #1, and the default "Rental" for my business #2?
Unfortunately, the answer is, no. When editing or creating a category, the only options under "Usage" are Personal, and Business… no ability to differentiate between different businesses, or between business and rental. Your practice of manually reassigning transactions probably isn't feasible for my transaction volume. I'll take another look at the possibility of batching, and at tracking one business as a "Business", and forgoing the B&P features for my other business, and just continuing to tracking it with a custom category.0
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