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Categorized Transfers in Q Mac
Quicken Community
Employee mod
Allow an expenditure category to be set for transfers. It's possible to enter data this way, but the transfer function overrides the category. This is important for budgeting. My use case is an IRA contribution. That is both a transfer (checking to brokerage) and a budget category (IRA Contribution), since it's going from liquid to illiquid. Also important for tracking physical assets, e.g., transferring X dollars from checking into the asset value of a car on purchase, but also tracking the payment (and loss of liquid cash) in the budget.
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So there needs to be a way to budget for transfers, selectively. If you've been using Quicken Mac for a while, you may be aware that a similar need existed with reports, and over the past year, they have added the ability to selectively include or exclude transfers from reports. The product manager indicated that was a necessary first step to allowing budgets to similarly include or exclude certain transfers. The developers understand that users want this functionality and why, and we've been told it's under development was they tackle a number of significant feature requests for the budget area of the program.
Unfortunately, we don't yet know when this functionality will appear, just that they are working on it.
(This is one of the longest-running, and most highly voted, feature requests. If you care to read it, the existing feature request is here; you can note that it is one of the rare Idea topics marked as "Planned" in the blue box under the initial post.)
Tax - related reports will correctly show these transactions based on tax line items.
FYI - in QMac, contributions/distributions to/from retirement accounts are recorded by assigning a category to the transfer. The categories carry the appropriate tax line assignments.
The QMac system has an advantage over the QWin system in that one can make both pre-tax and after-tax contributions via transfers to a given retirement account - just set the appropriate category for the transfer.
Am curious as to what modifications they (Quicken) have in mind to handle these transactions as they move away from the ability to assign categories to transfers in QMac.
Quicken user since 1991
Now running Quicken Windows Subscription, Home & Business
Retired "Certified Information Systems Auditor" & Bank Audit VP
Bad news: you can't do it currently. In fact, being able to budget for certain transfers, like loan payments or savings, is one of the feature requests with the highest number of votes on this forum.
Good news: the product manager for Quicken Mac acknowledged the need a long time ago, and said they were committed to bringing this functionality to the program. They started work on this more than a year ago, but apparently had to do some deep re-writing of the code for the budget part of the program in order to make this possible.
We don't know when this functionality will be released. It's been a long time coming, so the hope is sooner rather than later, but we just don't know. There are some signs one could look at optimistically: earlier this year, they added the ability to selectively include/exclude transfer from reports, so it's likely that a similar mechanism will be used for budgets. More recently, they added the ability to select which accounts to use for budgets. This was a feature request unto itself, but it's also likely a building block that was needed in order to be able to select which transfers to include in a budget.
1/ Income (money in)
2/ Expenses (money out)
3/ Contributions/retrievals to/from savings & assets accounts (moving assets around), and
4/ payments of debt (using assets to reduce liabilities).
Fundamentally this suggestion is about moving from a P&L view of personal finance to a total view of personal finance.
The pure income & expense view is too simplistic, IMHO.
Today I personally achieve this total finance view with manual accounts, manual transactions and reports in Excel. But it's a pain. It shouldn't be.
Here is a design idea that would enable transfers to have categories without breaking reports. It requires a simple change in data structure and some code rewrite:
Instead of "transfer" to be a category, it should be an attribute of any transaction (UI-wise could be a checkbox). Most transactions will have this attribute "off" (or "not transfer"). Transfers would have this attribute "on" (or "transfer"). The category could be anything the user wants it to be ("Save money in savings account", "Retrieve money from savings account", "Pay off debt", "Pay credit card", "Contribute to HSA", etc.)
The transactions with the attribute transfer "on" (or "transfer") would be required to have a counter party in one of the other accounts, and a sender/receiver attribute to derive direction of the transfer.
The reports would simply exclude both legs, or include one leg, or include both legs, depending on the type of the report and its purpose.
For example:
1/ A "classic" P&L report would exclude them, as it happens today
2/ A "comprehensive" P&L report would include one leg, useful for showing contributions to 401(k), contributions to HSA accounts, to 529 accounts, to ESPP accounts, etc.
3/ A B/S report would include both legs, as each increases/decreases the balance of the accounts included (less cash:less liability on CC, or less cash:increased assets in 401(k)).
4/ We could also have B/S movements reports, think of Sankey charts depicting changes in balance sheet period-over-period.
5/ This would also enable balance sheet budgets (who budget just the P&L?). I am budgeting how my assets, liabilities and net worth will evolve, in a way that is consistent with the P&L budget (I do this in Excel today, sadly)
On the comment that this would only benefit budgets: categorizing transfers is useful not only for budgets. Budgets are just plans, anticipated transactions in future periods of time, but transactions nonetheless just like the actuals.
Hope this helps, and that at some point I could have categorized transactions for a total financial view.
(This accomplishes your #2 item, doesn't it? As for #3, a balance sheet -- the net worth report -- is a snapshot in time, so I'm not sure I understand the role of transfers in such a report.)