Grasping The Concept

Indeed, you may be making things more complicated than they really are. Quicken can, and should be making things easier for you, not more complicated. And it is flexible enough to accommodate the various ways that people prefer to use it.

You've probably already setup accounts in Quicken for you Checking and Credit Card accounts. If you have a savings account you'll have set that up to.

Other things you can setup include Categories which are used to track spending and income; and Memorized Transactions which speeds up entering transactions. Memorized Transactions know the name of a payee or payor, and can know the normal Category that is associated with that payee/payor. Memorized Transactions can also have a memorized amount.

Quicken also lets you setup Reminders for bills and income, a feature that I find very important. When setting up an income Reminder, Quicken will ask if you want to setup a paycheck. Just follow the prompts and it will handle your gross, deductions and net for you, putting them all in the proper categories.

Don't be afraid to try things, create backups regularly, and ask questions here.

Start by figuring out what expenses that you want/need to track. One place to start is your tax return. What deduction, if any, do you report each year? Set up categories for each of these items. These will typically be medical, taxes paid, Gross wages (to match your w-2). Add categories for your day-to-day expenses like groceries, meals, household and anything else you might want to track. Start small and add new categories as you need to.

I try to keep a simple approach to things with Quicken. I *do* track all my payroll deductions by categories such as Federal Taxes, Medicare, etc. I do this because I like to ensure that the YTD deductions on my paystub as well as end of year W2s sync with what I have been doing. I also keep a separate category for 401K deductions. I do NOT use the 401K category as any kind of 'transfer' to another account for purchasing securities there. It is simply another category.

What I do NOT do is try to manage company contributions in their own right. Since my company's 401k plan is downloadable, I have a separate Q account for those securities. So all the purchases, regardless of whether they are from my deductions or the company's matching funds simply appear as a single buy transaction every 2 weeks when they are made. If I care to see how pays what for who, I can always log on to the 401k plan website and view the gory details.

As someone else pointed out, Q allows to record minutiae, but at the end, is that really helping you vs. the time it takes to do the recording?

Everyone's use of Q is different, of course, but this works for me.

I probably do it incorrectly but I only record my Net check. I rely on my year-end W2 to report the taxes on my tax return (I do validate it against the last check stub).

You can't spend your gross amount so you really need to either record the net check or record the gross amount + all of the deductions as part of your expense stream.

If you need to filter out a category then just customize the report and uncheck those categories. Memorize/save the report for future use.