Question about split transactions
in [Quicken]
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From: Doug on 20 Nov 2009 14:53 Hi Jose - please forgive me for beginning my comments, days ago, with the notion that you should not want to do that which you clearly want to do. Categorize anything you want any way you want. Now - Jose68 wrote: > 2. I don't see the value in knowing how much I spent in sales tax. But > I want to know how much I spent in things, including EVERYTHING that I > had to pay in exchange of the given good. Do you see the value in knowing how much you spent in state or local income tax, or property tax? Why do you want to know only some of your tax burden? I live in the suburbs outside Washington, DC. I sometimes shop in Maryland, Virginia, and in DC itself. The sales tax regimes in all three are different. Only by categorizing sales tax can I have any idea what I'm paying. One might very well expense the cost of a piece of software, but I certainly want to consider big-ticket, long-life purchases as assets in my Household Inventory account. Things like motor vehicles, living room furniture, photography equipment, or major electronics. For my own uses, Quicken is just as important for giving me an accurate Balance Sheet as it is for listing my income and expenses. Maybe more important. enjoy Quicken, Doug
From: Jose68 on 22 Nov 2009 14:48 No need to apologize, Doug! And let me clarify my point about tracking sales tax. What I said is that I don't see the value in know how much I spent in sales tax. But that is me. I can certainly understand why some people might want to do it. But for me, it's just not worth it. A large percentage of my transactions are single-category. If I were to track sales tax, most of them would be split categories, and it would just take more of my time. Now, for big items, I actually, do something similar to what you do, and what other posters were saying. I transfer all the amount to an asset account, including sales tax, but I depreciate sales tax immediately. The difference is that, in "my books", that depreciation is in the category Auto:Depreciation, instead of Sales Tax. It works for me. I can understand how your way works for you. But then we are back to square 1 :) If someone wants to allocate sales tax in a split for several categories, Q is not providing any help. And it would be an easy programming addition. Anyway, thanks for the conversation! It's always interesting to read different points of view!! Jose On Nov 20, 11:53 am, Doug <Doug_Ell...(a)yho.com> wrote: > Hi Jose - please forgive me for beginning my comments, days ago, with > the notion that you should not want to do that which you clearly want to > do. Categorize anything you want any way you want. > > Now -Jose68 wrote: > > > 2. I don't see the value in knowing how much I spent in sales tax. But > > I want to know how much I spent in things, including EVERYTHING that I > > had to pay in exchange of the given good. > > Do you see the value in knowing how much you spent in state or local > income tax, or property tax? Why do you want to know only some of your > tax burden? > > I live in the suburbs outside Washington, DC. I sometimes shop in > Maryland, Virginia, and in DC itself. The sales tax regimes in all > three are different. Only by categorizing sales tax can I have any idea > what I'm paying. > > One might very well expense the cost of a piece of software, but I > certainly want to consider big-ticket, long-life purchases as assets in > my Household Inventory account. Things like motor vehicles, living room > furniture, photography equipment, or major electronics. For my own > uses, Quicken is just as important for giving me an accurate Balance > Sheet as it is for listing my income and expenses. Maybe more important. > > enjoy Quicken, > Doug
From: Jim Nugent on 19 Dec 2009 08:16 Doug wrote: > Yours is one of the many questions we see here that can be reworded as > "why won't Quicken, an accounting program, let me violate all the > rules of accounting and put any number I want wherever I want?" > > You did NOT spend $28 on games and $39 on software. You spent what > you wrote. If you wish to pretend that money you spent on taxes was > spent on software, be my guest. But why would you imagine Quicken > would be programmed to facilitate faking the numbers? Because your financial recordkeeping system should tell you what you need to know. When I used to deduct state sales tax on my federal return, I had a separate category for it, and, in this example would have just entered all the numbers from the receipt. Now, I no longer track sales tax separately, and it's more useful to know what I paid for something, including the sales tax. So I also do the price*(1+ t) method. -- Jim
From: Jim Nugent on 19 Dec 2009 08:32 Jose68 wrote: > But please, don't get this into an accounting discussion. It is much > simpler. I know that a lot of people adds sales tax to the same > category of the item being purchased. If splits are a feature of the > program, it just makes sense to give options for users to do things in > a simpler way. A long, long time ago, I used to take a gas station receipt that included gas and a car wash, and split it into two pieces: Auto:Fuel and Auto:Maintenece. Now, I have three kids, a house, and too many demands on my time. It goes in as Auto:Fuel. A similar thing happens when I take a grocery store receipt and enter it as "Groceries." It may include dishwasher detergent, paper towels, tissues and what not, but I ignore that and just budget "Groceries" taking the above into account. How this is done depends on what I want to learn from my financial records. That's probably different for different people. -- Jim
From: John Pollard on 23 Dec 2009 10:05
Jose68 wrote: > Jim, I agree. It all depends on how you want to track your finances. > > Now I have another example that's bugging me. I have my TV, phone and > internet with AT&T U-verse. The invoice is something like this: > > U-verse TV - $79 > Broadband - $35 > Phone - $25 > HD fee - $10 > CA local video fees - $7.01 > Federal Universal Service fund - $2 > Sales Tax - $1.68 > > It is a pain to manually distribute the CA local video fees, Fed > service fund and sales tax among my 3 categories: TV, internet and > phone. > > How do you guys categorize this in Quicken? > > In MS Money, it was "easy". I input the total bill, the first 4 items, > and the remaining amount (those $10.69) was magically and > proportionately split among those 4 items. Do you all have a category > for "Federal Universal Service Fund" or equivalent? Or for State > video fees? Or even sales tax? I suspect that the "local video fees" should apply only to the cable portion of the bill; and the "Federal Universal Service fund" should apply only to the phone portion of the bill. So I'm not sure spreading either of the two over all other split categories would be correct. |