Income and Expense by Category

snipped-for-privacy@mindspring.com wrote

In Quicken 2012, I want to do an income and expense report by category, but Quicken insists on counting inter-account transfers as income for the receiving account. I tried customizing the category list and checking only the income stream I want but no dice.

How do I include only *real* income?

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All Quicken categories - and every transfer transaction contains a category - are either income-like or expense-like. Some Quicken reports will display the transfers in a separate group (income, expense, transfers), other reports only offer the income/expense breakdown.

And where you see a transfer in the income group, you should also see its other half in the expense group ... unless you have specifically customized the report to exclude all "expense" transfer categories.

When transfer transactions are selected for a report, it usually depends on what report, and what report "Organization" (Display tab of Customize dialog) you are using, as to how the transfers will be displayed.

There are three ways to control (select) transfers for reports.

1.) At the macro level, you can exclude all transfers from virtually every Quicken report. See the Transfers dropdown on the Advanced tab of the Customize dialog.

2.) If you want to see some transfers, but not all; you can select/deselect them by category - which sounds like what you did. That will work if you choose the correct categories. What I sometimes call "account categories" (or "transfer categories") are at the end of the list of categories on the Categories tab in the Customize dialog. Selecting, or deselecting, the correct categories will include or exclude the specific transfer categories you select or deselect.

3.) The lowest level of control over transfers would be by transaction. To utilize that approach, you'd have to have something in each transfer transaction that would allow you to identify it for reporting purposes. You could use specific payee names, for example; or you could put some unique text in the Memo field of the transactions you wanted to control in reports. You probably already know how to include/exclude "payees" for reports: but you can also include/exclude transactions by what their Memo fields "contain" (see the "Memo contains" field on the Categories tab in the Customize dialog).

As I read your post, you didn't want any transfers in the report. You should be able to eliminate all your transfers from the report by using method #1.

Thank you.