Perhaps someone here has insight or accounting experience to help with this. I would like to track my child-related expenses with some specificity in order to keep to a fairly detailed budget. They are older children, so some expenditures are similar to mine (auto insurance) while some are different (tuition). I just finished setting up several subcategories under a broad child-related category, mirroring the budget I am preparing. However, it occurred to me that, perhaps, it would be better to group all auto insurance, for example, together and to use a "child-related" class to separate off the stuff for my kids. Is there any real advantage to doing it one way as opposed to another? [QW06H&B]
Classes or new categories
Jan 05, 2008
5 Replies
So, are you allocating some of your utility costs to your children? What about mortgage interest? Groceries?
No, I'm describing only direct costs or otherwise separable costs. Expenses, in other words, that benefit them directly and would not be incurred but for them. So, I'm not including costs I would have anyway, nor costs that benefit me that I might not incur but for them (like my own travel expenses). I just need to track how much money is going directly to them and in what categories. (One of the purposes is tracking trouble spots, and another is heading in the direction of allocating a lump sum that they would then budget and manage.) I think I've decided that classes would not provide sufficient information or benefit, although in a different situation I can see how they would be more useful, e.g., if there were reporting or tax issues. Comments?
While I don't have Q2006, I do have Q2005 and Q2008, and the treatment of "Tags" in Q2008 is little different than the treatment of classes in Q2005, with the exception that "Tags" can be displayed, entered and reported in a separate field from the category.
I can assign multiple classes to a transaction in Q2005 and get the same result as assigning multiple tags in Q2008: effectively what happens is a new tag with subtags is implicitly created.
If a transaction has TagA and TagB assigned, it will appear in reports, subtotaled by Tag, as a single tag: TagA:TagB. In Q2005, it would have been ClassA:ClassB.
Thanks for the clarification, John. I didn't realize that functionality was available in the earlier version.
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