About Categories


The whole point of using Quicken is to gain better control over your finances. To achieve that control, you'll need to know where your money comes from and where your money goes. You use Quicken's categories to track the flow of money. For example, when you buy food at the grocery store and record the transaction in a Quicken register, you can record it under the Groceries category. Later, when you're curious about how much money you spend on groceries, you can create a report that adds up all of your grocery transactions. You canand shouldassign a category to each transaction that you enter into Quicken.

By categorizing all of your transactions in Quicken, you can generate reports and graphs about the details of your income and expenses; save time and money while preparing your tax returns; and get a clearer view of your financial picture.

Because categories are used to track the flow of money, you need to be concerned about whether the money is flowing in or out. Money that is flowing in, such as your paycheck, is tracked using income categories. Money that you spend on your mortgage, utilities, groceries, and other bills is tracked using expense categories. A third type of category, the transfer category is used just to keep track of money that you move from one Quicken account into another.

You'll often want to track several types of income or expenses that are related to a single category. Quicken lets you use subcategories to handle these relations. For example, under the Medical category, you might have several subcategories for Doctors, Dentists, Prescriptions, and Insurance. Later, when you run an expense report, you'll be able to see just how much money you spent on each of the medical subcategories.

Quicken comes with a preset category list, but most people end up customizing their categories to better reflect their particular financial situation. For example, I write books for a living, and I want to know how much money each book brings in. So in my Quicken file, I set up a Writing category, and then I use the name of each book as a subcategory . At the end of the year, my income report shows me how much money each book brought in, and also shows the total for everything that is part of the Writing category.



Managing Your Personal Finances with Quicken. Visual QuickProject Guide
Managing Your Personal Finances with Quicken: Visual QuickProject Guide
ISBN: 0321293657
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 107
Authors: Tom Negrino

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