Does Quicken B&P for Mac have any way to keep some accounts private?

Swampy

My wife & I are considering getting Quicken Business & Personal for Mac to help us manage the books for our rental properties. We would share access to the accounts for the properties, as well as others, such as credit card accounts. But there are some accounts we don't share and don't want. to share. For example, our retirement accounts. She's a very conservative investor, and I'm much more aggressive. Sharing access to our retirement accounts would likely lead to anxiety & heart attacks for her, and disappointment & frustration for me.

So, does Quicken B&P have any way to specify certain accounts as personal? (E.g., by password protecting the accounts, or by synchronizing only the shared portion of the data?)

Quicken Kristina

Hello @Swampy,

Thank you for coming to the Community with this question. While you cannot password protect individual accounts, you can select what accounts you want to sync with the Quicken Cloud. In the desktop program, you would choose the Quicken menu option, then Settings. In Settings, click on Mobile, Web & Alerts.

In the Accounts tab, you can select which accounts you want to sync. Accounts that are not synced should not be visible in the Quicken Companion apps (Quicken on the Web and Quicken Mobile).

I hope this helps!

jacobs

You could consider having two, or even three, separate Quicken data files. You could have one data file for your business and one for personal. But that doesn't get you to independent access for your retirement accounts. So since you don't share information about your retirement accounts, and don't want to, consider simply having a separate Quicken data file for your wife's retirement accounts.

NotACPA

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20492211#Comment_20492211

While, @jacobs advice is workable, and might be what you require, It will also create a complicated mess come tax time as your tax info will be spread across 3 Q data files.

I'd suggest that you and the wife simply agree to not look at the other's info and include the business in the joint file.

My opinion has always been that a Q data file should represent ALL of the info for an single tax entity and ONLY the info for that tax entity.

jacobs

My opinion has always been that a Q data file should represent ALL of the info for an single tax entity and ONLY the info for that tax entity.

@NotACPA I agree with you. But the user here was looking for something that can’t be done in Quicken — having some accounts only user A can see and some that only user B can see. (Even if that were possible, I would think someone would need all the data to do taxes or calculate RMDs at some point.) So my suggestion of separate data files was just a way to hide the retirement accounts from each other.

Let me add this thought to @Swampy: since both spouses understand and acknowledge their different philosophies regarding retirement investing, and have agreed to allow each partner to do what they prefer, then is it really necessary to hide the accounts from each other? Not seeing the accounts won’t prevent either spouse from thinking their partner has the wrong approach, and might even increase anxiety because of the unknown of their spouse’s retirement fund value.