parent/child category questions (Q08)

I also have several categories where I want to track expenses for sub- categories but care about budget only for the parent category. What I do is distribute the budget for the parent to the children, based on averages for the past year. Then I monitor only the rolled-up total on the reports.

I'm also careul never to allow expenses to fall into an Other subcategory. At the end of each month, I examine the expense report for the month and correct any entries have have fallen into an Other subcategory.

You say you "don't care how it gets spent with the child categories." I suspect you are like me and don't care for budget purposes but do care for other purposes. If not for any purpose, then that's an argument for consolidating the cateogry.

Guy

Exactly! There are some details we like to keep separated so we know how we're spending our money, but for most cases we like to budget at a much higher level.

So you deal with some of the displays that show you the most off budget categories because Q doesn't treat the parent as the sum of all subcategories, and then use other reports to see how you're performing on your budget?

Why do you avoid "other" categories? The only reason I can assume you'd do this is so the sum of all subcategories equals the parent, but couldn't you consider "other" as being another child? What I've been doing is there are some child categories that I find very useful to separate for reporting reasons. However, there are other things that belong to the parent, but I don't see any value in creating special sub categories for them because their total value on an annual basis is way too small to care. Maybe that is what's making it difficult for me to create a workable budget in Q?

Scott

I'm not sure what you mean by "Q doesn't treat the parent as the sum of all subcategories." Mostly it does, unless you exclude some subcategories from a report; that can confuse issues. I pay almost no attention to the budget excesses report on the Quicken home page; I find that an essentially useless curiosity. I look at two budget reports monthly: last month and year to date. Those reports give us guidance for the spending during the upcoming month. During the month, I will sometimes look at the current month report to see how things are going and whether we need to correct any spending.

I avoid "other" categories because it's impossible to tell the difference between a true "other" and an expense that has been sloppily placed in the "other" category instead of its proper subcategory. Now, I don't do that 100%. I do have one category where the child is used to separate out some expenses but most of the expense goes into the parent category. That developed when I combined two separate categories by making one a subcategory of the other.

However, in most cases, a category is divided into discrete subcategories. For example, the Taxes category has subcategories for each specific kind of tax. It makes no sense to (for later tax reporting purposes) to record something as a "tax" but not which kind of tax. My Medical category has eight or so subcategories, and they cover every reasonable division of medical expenses. When I later prepare my tax return, I essentially copy the total of each subcategory to the tax return.

We have a category for dining out, with subs for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. This is an example where we have to make budgets for the subcategories but monitor only the rolled up totals for the Dining category. Medical is a mixed bag, where I monitor expense against budget for some categories but also monitor the rolled up totals.

Guy

I will say upfront that I do not use the Budget feature in Quicken. I have always found it too complex to set-up. Of course I am probably making it more difficult then necessary. :)

What I am doing in Q2008 is to use more of the TAGS feature to consolidate subcategories back into the parent. Although TAGS aren't really different then CLASSES in earlier versions, they are now easier to work with. About the only place left I still have some subcategories is to breakout items for income taxes - I have not spent the time to see if consolidating makes sense.

The example for Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Snacks is a great use for TAGS.

Oilcan

Quite possibly. :) It did take me a couple of years to get budgets working very smoothly. I think I didn't really rely on them until Q2007. It took a while to determine which expenses were best handled with budgets and which ones were best handled with savings goals.

I am using Q2007 so have only a single class I can assign to a transaction. We use it to distinguish *who* the expense is for--my wife or myself. In Q2008, I suppose you could do that with multiple tags, but I am happy with our approach.

Of course, classes/tags play differently in the reports than do subcategories.

Guy

You can assign more than one class to a transaction in Q2007 (as far as I know, it's always been possible).

Just key a colon after the first class name in the category field, then key the second class.

For subtotalling purposes, this more or less creates a new class whose name is the combination of the two class names.

For selection purposes; selecting either class alone will select the transaction that is assigned two classes.