Including both transfer and category in budget and net worth reporting

cdevillafranca_70

Running Mac version 8.1.2 on Mac OS 15.4.1.

I have various liability accounts (car loan as example) that I transfer to. I also want to budget this as a sub-category under Auto Expenses. When I record the transaction as both category and transfer against the loan, it does not appear under the category. Means I have include that account's transfers and track it separately. I am retired and have a similar situation of assets transferring into a checking account. Not being able to record both transfer and category and report them both makes it difficult to do budget reporting as well as net worth monitoring.

I saw earlier closed threads on this topic with the comment that Quicken was thinking of eliminating transfers that include category. Seems like the wrong direction - rather than fixing reporting on a useful feature, remove the feature?

Any updates or comments on this topic?

Quicken Kristina

Hello @cdevillafranca_70,

Thank you for sharing your experience. You are not the only one who would like to see the functionality changed. I'd recommend taking a look at this Idea post and adding your vote + a comment if it's something you'd like to see added:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7955187/treat-categorized-transfers-as-preference-toggle-edited

Ideas that get enough votes may be implemented in the future!

In the meantime, depending on what you're trying to do and where you need the information to be visible, maybe using tags will help? For more information on tags, please review this article: https://info.quicken.com/mac/learning-about-categories-and-tags#Learningaboutcategoriesandtags-Whataretags?

I hope this helps!

Chris_QPW

I think the likelihood of that feature ever being implemented is next to zero, especially when you read @jacobs has posted in it and the fact it only has the original poster's vote.

But more to the point, instead of breaking away from good accounting practices, like not setting up things where you might double count a transaction in a report, and that for years Quicken Mac developers have been working towards getting away from this, for budgeting there is already a fix. which @jacobs describes in that idea thread. Or for "envelop budgeters" there is already another idea mentioned in that thread that already has the status of "Planned".

jacobs

@cdevillafranca_70 As Chris mentioned, a transaction whihc is both a transfer and an expense violates the rules of accounting, which is why the developers said they would bar users from creating such transactions. I have no idea why they said it and yet haven't done it, other than that it's been way down on their priority list (and probably the complexity of barring it in the future without messing up past transactions some users have).

But they did create a different way to include transfers in your budget: when you do Select Categories, scroll down to "T" an you'll find Tansfer To and Transfer From pseudo-categories for each of your accounts, so you can check the ones you want in your budget. (You don't want them all; for instance paying your credit card bill shouldn't be in your budget, because the individual credit card charges are already included in the budget.)

The only thing this doesn't allow you to do is position your loan payment under Auto Expenses; it shows up in a separate section of the budget below the expenses, but it accomplishes exactly what you want.

You also mentioned in the headline above including transfers in Net Worth reports, but I don't understand what you're seeking here. A Net Worth report shows the value of each of your accounts as of a specific moment in time. Categories and transfers don't have anything to do with that.

cdevillafranca_70

Thanks for the workaround. That's pretty much what I figured - not perfect but doable.

FYI the net worth piece comes when paying down a liability. Mortgage, car loan, home improvement are all liability accounts I have that diminish as paid down. The payment is therefore both an expense when looked at purely from cash flow and a transfer from the balance sheet perspective.

jacobs

A Net Worth report (balance sheet) is merely the value of each account as of a date in time. There are no expenses or transfers reported on such a report. Only a report showing transactions would include expenses and transfers.