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Budgeting Income for Personal and Business User

drumsdb

I asked a version of this on another thread a few weeks ago, but it seems to have gotten lost. I'm hoping someone from Quicken can advise.

I was previously entering my salary separately into my personal checking account (as Salary Income) and a business expense of Salary out of the business checking. However, due to my Single Member LLC, this is not correct, and they need to be reclassified as "Owner Draw/Equity," Which is not currently an option for the business.

As I do keep both my personal and business in the same file, I can use transfers to manage this correctly in the short term for the business. (Though I look forward to the "Owner Draw" being added). However, when I do this, I can't track that income in our personal budget as I have been doing for years. How can I classify a "transfer in" under personal income for budgeting purposes? It would have to be a "transfer in" from a specific account (or accounts) and with a specific, overwritten payee.

Is there another suggested method? It's killing me not having budgeting for the last few months.

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Comments

Quicken Laura

Hi @drumsdb,

Thank you for reaching out and sharing your experience. I understand how frustrating it must be to go several months without a fully functional budget, especially when you're trying to keep your personal and business finances organized.

Regarding the accounting treatment, categorizing these transactions as an Owner's Draw rather than a Salary is generally appropriate for a single-member LLC, depending on its tax classification and circumstances.

In Quicken Mac, you can include transfers into your personal checking account in your budget by selecting the appropriate transfer category. To try this workaround, please follow these steps:

Click on the Budgets tab at the top of your Quicken Mac screen.
In the upper-left corner of the budget window, click Edit Budget.
Look toward the bottom-left corner of that window and click the Select Categories button.
In the category list that appears, scroll completely past the standard Income and Expense sections until you reach the Transfers In section near the bottom.
Locate the name of the business account sending the funds (for example: "FROM [Your Business Checking account]") and check the box next to it.
Click OK to save your changes.

Once the transfer category is included, the incoming transfers should appear as a separate line item in your personal budget. You can then set a budgeted amount for that category to help track the funds transferred from your business account.

Please give this a try and let me know whether it helps you track these transfers in your personal budget.

I hope this workaround helps, and thank you for your patience!

drumsdb

Laura,
Thanks for the response. I believe there is a small typo in #5 and you mean "select the name of the account SENDING the funds," that then receiving. If so, as I eluded to earlier, I tried this fix and it doesn't work. Multiple accounts have various types of "transfers in" from the primary business checking account and not just the owner draw transfer.

For example:
1) Credit card payments from the business to either any credit card also tracked in Quicken (Both personal and business)
2) Transfers from a business checking to business savings

As such, when I tried this fix, it vastly inflated the income needed for the budget which also created confusion as those were payments to expenses and not income.

Quicken Laura

Hi @drumsdb,

Thank you for catching that typo! I've updated my response with the correct information, and I appreciate you bringing it to my attention.

As an alternative, you can categorize each side of the transaction separately:

Business Checking: Categorize the withdrawal using the built-in Transfer category, which isn't treated as income or an expense.
Personal Checking: Categorize the deposit under the Salary income category.

This approach lets you keep tracking the income in your budget as you did before.

If you'd like to see this functionality added in the future, I encourage you to submit an idea post. This way, other users who have the same or a similar request can vote on your idea.

Our Development and Product teams frequently use our idea posts in order to improve Quicken and implement new features requested by customers.

Thank you!