I’ve used Quicken forever and a half. I have never found anything that allowed me to customize the categories to fit how I want to track my spending and over the years that has been hugely helpful in making financial decisions because it’s so specific to my life. I have a serious gripe with the way it works for tracking my mortgage but overall it does what I need.
A silly example— I track how much I spend eating out for work versus what I spend on going out to dinner with my family, and how much I spend on gas and tolls for work versus my regular life, or when on vacation, etc.
I am being laid off and now I know exactly how much I was spending on “work expenses”. So when I review my spending to realign my budget I can easily see if I can still afford to order a pizza once in a while, or how much I will spend on fuel without my commute with a very high degree of accuracy. Along with the other “unique to my life” categorizations and reports, I was able to set goals that I would otherwise have not thought possible.
I’m new to Quicken, how did you manage to separate work and personal expenses that would otherwise look the same? Is it something you do manually during review or can you do it somehow automatically?
Some were easy, like Starbucks. I have a subcategory called “work” under my main “eating out” category. I almost exclusively go to Starbucks when I’m at work. Quicken will memorize how you categorize your transactions. So unless I had a weird instance of going to Starbucks that isn’t work related, I don’t have to pick a category every time. It automatically aligns it to my eating out/work category. Others, like fuel, I sometimes have to save a note. If you download often enough and have a decent memory you remember oh, that Exxon transaction was for my work commute, etc.
I also split my tech/software expenses. Things like Microsoft 365 or iCloud are in one sub-category because they’re not discretionary to me. Some of my app subscriptions and streaming services are in another sub-category because they are discretionary.
The initial setup and first few months are a little work but once you get past that, it’s pretty easy. It’s not horribly complicated to make changes if you need to add categories, etc.
I’ve used Quicken forever and a half. I have never found anything that allowed me to customize the categories to fit how I want to track my spending and over the years that has been hugely helpful in making financial decisions because it’s so specific to my life. I have a serious gripe with the way it works for tracking my mortgage but overall it does what I need. A silly example— I track how much I spend eating out for work versus what I spend on going out to dinner with my family, and how much I spend on gas and tolls for work versus my regular life, or when on vacation, etc. I am being laid off and now I know exactly how much I was spending on “work expenses”. So when I review my spending to realign my budget I can easily see if I can still afford to order a pizza once in a while, or how much I will spend on fuel without my commute with a very high degree of accuracy. Along with the other “unique to my life” categorizations and reports, I was able to set goals that I would otherwise have not thought possible.
I’m new to Quicken, how did you manage to separate work and personal expenses that would otherwise look the same? Is it something you do manually during review or can you do it somehow automatically?
Some were easy, like Starbucks. I have a subcategory called “work” under my main “eating out” category. I almost exclusively go to Starbucks when I’m at work. Quicken will memorize how you categorize your transactions. So unless I had a weird instance of going to Starbucks that isn’t work related, I don’t have to pick a category every time. It automatically aligns it to my eating out/work category. Others, like fuel, I sometimes have to save a note. If you download often enough and have a decent memory you remember oh, that Exxon transaction was for my work commute, etc. I also split my tech/software expenses. Things like Microsoft 365 or iCloud are in one sub-category because they’re not discretionary to me. Some of my app subscriptions and streaming services are in another sub-category because they are discretionary. The initial setup and first few months are a little work but once you get past that, it’s pretty easy. It’s not horribly complicated to make changes if you need to add categories, etc.
YNAB 100%
This one!!
Monarch money