1. Home
  2. Quicken Personal Finance
  3. Categories, Classes, etc.

Categories, Classes, etc.

I think I asked this a long time ago, but I forgot the answer.

I like to track where my money goes in pretty fine detail. When I buy gas I break it out with state and federal fuel taxes as well as sales tax. I currently do this with classes, but it makes it difficult to run a report that contains only the tax and not the whole transaction amount. In addition, the built-in graphs and stuff don't show these classes as part of the "Tax" category. I thought I would remedy this by making some sub-categories of "Tax" to track all of this. That works fine for the reports when I want to look at taxes, but then it excludes that amount from the purchase.

An example will probably make this a lot easier to explain. If I spent $1.07 at a store for a soft drink and recorded the transaction with a split like this:

McDonald's Dining $0.99 Dining/sales tax $0.08

I am able to track the sales tax somewhat in reports, but it's difficult, and the taxes don't show up in the built-in reports. If I enter it like this:

McDonald's Dining $0.99 Dining/Tax:sales tax $0.08

Then the tax still does not show up in any of the built-in reports or graphs.

If I do this: McDonald's Dining $0.99 Tax:sales tax $0.08

Then all of my reports don't show the 8 cents under dining. This creates problems for budgeting.

Is there anyway to keep track of sales tax so that it shows up on the built-in reports and graphs under taxes, and so that cash flow reports will report the full $1.07 as a "Dining" category?

Reply to
Jerry Baker
Loading thread data ...

Jerry - I just got to ask, WHY do you care about this? Can this possibly affect any decisions you make, or is the tracking (in this case) of dining sales tax have ANY bearing on your financial life whatsoever? Is there ANY practical reason (like refunds of sales tax, perhaps?) that this matters?

I just am curious why you'd go to all this trouble when I don't see how it could possibly provide any practical (or impractical, for that matter!) benefit.

Of course, I too, am anal to a degree - so if your answer truly is "because I like to" and that's that, absolutely ok! I just am curious if I'm missing something. No one can ever criticize others as to what they like to do, so don't take my question in that regard as any sort of criticism...just pure curiosity!

Reply to
Andrew

Right. It's unlikely that deducting the sales tax on all purchases will exceed the 2% requirement or even the personal deduction.

Reply to
Stubby

Jerry,

I track all sales taxes in case I can get the sales tax deduction now provided on the Federal return. I just use a single category "Tax:Sales Tax" and record transactions as splits to break out the sales tax. Of course, the category has the correct tax line assignment so it imports nicely into TurboTax.

I agree with some of the other responses, what you want to do does seem like a bit of overkill. However, to each his own! Here's what you can do.

I believe you want to use categories instead of classes. For each category that you want to track sales tax, create a sub-category. For example, if you have a "Dining" category, create a "Dining:Sales Tax" sub-category. For each of your new Sales Tax sub-categories, provide the correct tax line assignment; specifically, "Schedule A:Sales Tax Paid". You will be creating a lot of sales tax sub-categories.

Now, when you run an expense report, your dining expenses will be broken out into "Dining" and "Dining:Sales Tax".

To determine the total amount of Sales Tax, run one of the built-in Tax reports such as "Schedule A-Itemized Deductions", "Tax Schedule", or "Tax Summary".

I hope this helps.

Randy Stevens

Reply to
Randy Stevens

BeanSmart website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.