Car/Insurnace or Insurance/Car? How categorize?

You're kidding, right?

Notan

You're kidding, right?

Notan

No ... I'm not

Does it bother you?

I take it you don't have children or pets, as a quick Usenet search reveals that you haven't, yet, asked for name suggestions.

Notan

I use two cat's. (1) Automotive with sub of Insurance. That gives me an immediate report of all expenses associated with Automotive and (2) Insurance with sub cat's of all others - Housing, Contents etc. (Aus Version) Regards Frederick

Notan...why do you waste your time posting?

Your posts never add any info to Usenet

Thanks

Appreciate the advice

I use Transport/Insurance, Household/Insurance and Medical/Insurance respectively.

Insurance, as a collective group, doesn't appear anywhere on my tax returns ... but SOME insurance expenses are tax-deductible since my wife & I are both self-employed and they're self-emp business expenses.

I try to align my Q income and expense categories so that I've got a very straight-forward import into TTAX.

db

In my view (YMMV), it depends on how you 'value' insurance. In other words, if it is necessary because of something else, I use a subcategory under 'something else'. Like CAR:INSURANCE or HOUSEHOLD:INSURANCE. In my way of thinking, those types of insurances are part of 'doing business' of the bigger category (eg: CAR and HOUSEHOLD - take either of them away, the need for the insurance subcategory goes away). Other items (like LIFE INSURANCE) I have under INSURANCE:LIFE. In that case, I don't think of anything that it is really a part of, so it stands alone under the insurance category. .

But, as you surmise, it really depends on how you do things. This is similar to an index. Say you're writing a book about baseball and baseball players. An entry could either be in the index BARRYBONDS:HOMERUNS or HOMERUNS:BARRYBONDS. So it really depends on how you wish to slice and dice!

Regards -

- Andrew

I do the same thing.

Ah... good point I hadn't thought of!

Thanks

The analogy to a book index breaks down. In the book, you can have both entries or have one entry refer to the other:

Barry Bonds: Home Runs Senate Testimony

and

Home Runs: Barry Bonds Mark McGwire

or

Home Runs: See (Barry Bonds; MarkMcGwire)

The point being that in Quicken, how you organize it does have more effect on your ability to retrieve the data in a comprehensive form. The same is not true of the book.

In Quicken, if you categorize your insurance as subclasses of Insurance, you are not able to pull a single report to provide auto and housing expenses, and if you categorize the expenses under Autos and Housing, you cannot get a comprehensive report on Insurance costs, so you can't browbeat your insurance broker with how much business you do with him.

It is a trade-off. One may from time to time wish to use Find/Replace and alter these types of categories simply to get the right report. Fortunately that is easy to do.

Bingo!

Exactly my problem above!

Just curious what others are doing and what makes most sense overall

Well, you can use a different CLASS for each insurance carrier/broker ... and pull a transaction report that only includes the particular class ... no matter what the category.

db

Yes Mike - true - not a very good example. What I was trying to point out is that depending on what you wish to do, you can certainly have it in A:B or B:A order. And in an index, you can have BOTH entries in the index, whereas in Q, only one category in effect at any one time. It wasn't a good example.

----------------------------- Regards -

- Andrew

And all the respondents to this thread missed the clue in my prior post. Using Find/Replace you can simply change the category around at the time of reporting! :D

Insurance:Property & Casualty (P&C):Home or I:P&C:Auto Insurance:Medical Insurance:Life

Classes are used to distinguish between insured assets or individuals. e.g. I:P&C:Auto/Truck, I:Life/

Saved reports cover situations when a relevant category is outside the same category as the bulk of the categories of interest.

Why Classes? Rick Hess and others have posted extensively on the value of using classes to distinguish between the same expense incurred for different items of the same general type. Their arguments were persuasive for me.

Why Insurance then subcategories by line of insurance? It reflects the way we set up our paper files. It reflects the way we think.

HTH, Tom S.