Community Discussion: How To Choose Brokerage Account For Rent Payments?
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Another Quicken user runs afoul of Quicken's poorly designed rental property features. [In fairness to Quicken, rental users are almost certainly a tiny minority; it's hard to see how those users could provide enough income to Quicken to offset the programming changes they'd like to see.]
Fortunately for Quicken rental property users, the primary problem described by the original poster in the Community Discussion is easily overcome.
The same approach that solves so many other rental property complaints, also solves this one: namely; delete the Rent Reminder automatically created by Quicken when a new Quicken Tenant is assigned to a Quicken property, and manually create a new Reminder using Manage Bill & Income Reminders. The requirements for such a user-created Reminder have been posted in this newsgroup multiple times.
A manually created Quicken rent Reminder will permit investment accounts to be chosen for the rent deposit.
[An alternative, and I think better, approach would be to create a 'dummy' account (a checking or cash account, for example) to deposit rent income; while planning to 'transfer' that rent from the 'dummy' account to the investment account when the rent is actually received/deposited.]
As to the 'problem' of Quicken treating transfers as 'income' (or 'expense'); for starters, it may help to recognize that EVERY transaction in Quicken is, at its root, an income or an expense transaction. In Quicken, there are no other possibilities.
But Quicken offers several different mechanisms for excluding 'transfers' from reports, or from the Income or Expense section of reports.
Transfer transactions can be excluded by excluding the FROM or TO account-categories on the Categories tab in a report Customize dialog. Transfers can also be excluded using the 'Transfers' dropdown on the Advanced tab in a report Customize dialog.
Another method for excluding transfers (or any transactions, for that matter) from Quicken reports requires keying user-chosen text in the Memo field of transactions expected to be 'selectable' in Quicken reports - text that is unique enough so that no other transaction type could have that text in its Memo field - then filtering out transactions that contain that text, using Quicken's 'Matching' criteria.
To understand how the 'Matching' section of report Customize tabs works; click on the question mark in the blue circle at the lower left of any report Customize Tab to get Help for 'How do I customize a report or graph' - then scroll down to the Notes section and select the Categories (or Payees, or Tags) link, then scroll down to the Matching section and click the 'criteria' link.