Trial balance & Nominal Ledger

I do not have Quicken Home & Business, just Quicken Deluxe, but . . .

An Account Balance Report would be an approximation of a Trial Balance (well, a portion of one, anyway). I understand that Quicken Home & Business does offer a Balance Sheet, which would also approximate a portion of a Trial Balance. Neither report shows the income and expense accounts, which a true Trial Balance would show.

A Transaction Report by Category or Itemized Category Report would be an approximation of a General Ledger, but it does not show asset, liability or equity accounts. It does, however, show the income and expense accounts.

You could also give the accountant a copy of the Quicken file itself and let her run any reports she wishes (I assume that your Quicken file contains only transactions for your business and does include any personal transactions).

I, too, don't have Quicken H&B, only Quicken Deluxe but agree with Steven that just giving your accountant a copy of your Quicken file might be the best bet.

A year-end Account Balance report with all accounts included plus an Income/Expense by Category report for the year (all accounts included, all categories included, all transfers excluded) is the equivalent of a trial balance.

The closest you can come to a nominal ledger (general ledger here in the US) would be to produce a Register Report for each account (Investment accounts in Quicken don't have this report coded in, but I'll assume you don't have Investment accounts) and then produce, one at a time, Income/Expense by Category reports for the year for each category and subcategory, expanded to show all detail. A very tedious process.

Tom Young

Ignoring investment accounts and formatting/sorting, isn't this the same as doing two transaction reports, one sorted by category and the other by account? What have I missed?

Mike

A general ledger for a period shows every single detail of every single entry made for the period sorted by account (I'm using "account" in the sense that accountants use that term which includes all balance sheet accounts and all income/expense categories) and within account by date. I know of no way of producing that report within Quicken. The combination of a register report for each account plus an Itemized Categories report sorted by date (which is better than my previous one-at-a-time suggestion) comes closest.

I'm not sure which "transaction reports" you have in mind: you can sort the Itemized Categories report by date and by account ("account" used here in the sense that Quicken uses the term) but that just changes the order of presentation *within* the hard-coded top-level sort of categories.

I've never even thought about producing a true general ledger within Quicken and that was the best I could come up with off the top of my head. Is there a better way?

Tom Young

Tom Young

I thought from various discussions about Quicken and double entry accounting that Quicken Categories were equivalent to accounting "Accounts". If so, the banking transaction report sub-totalled by category and sorted by date was what I'd meant.

Mike

Mike:

No, that doesn't work because the section of the report dealing with balance sheet accounts only reports transfers, not all activity in the accounts, plus it doesn't show opening and ending balances in the account like a Register Report does. As far as I can see the closest thing to a general ledger you can get out of Quicken is the combination of individual Register Reports plus an "Expand all" and date sorted Itemized Categories report. And even that leaves out the equity portion of the balance sheet which means your derived general ledger really doesn't balance.

Tom Young