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Quicken [arrgh.]
I'm trying to figure out how much money each of dan and me have put toward our expenses since we moved here 8 years ago. In a rough sense, to the nearest thousand dollars. I'm drowning in a sea of data.
And I want to boot Quicken to the curb.
The first problem with Quicken: exchange rates. It doesn't keep historical rates. When we moved here, the US dollar was worth $1.50 CAD. I put a lot of money in then. Now the US dollar's worth $1.06 CAD. Quicken, amazingly, reports it all at the current exchange rate. OK, so between both of us there are only about 25 contributions in USD of a sizable amount. So I can maybe do them each manually outside Quicken, though I wish there were a way to do that and use Quicken as the authoritative data without setting up parallel "translated" transactions. Ugh how annoying and inelegant.
The next problem is partly conceptual on my part, but Quicken doesn't make it easier. I won't be offended if you skip reading this bit; my eyes glaze over when I try to think about it. My hope is that writing it out will help, and maybe somebody else will be clear enough on it to say "yes, that's right." Here are two simple situations and one that wraps my head in knots: [or, did, before I wrote it out...] [ack. but it doesn't work right. ack.]
We have a Cash account, which I've used if someone pays for a joint expense on a personal account (so, otherwise not recorded in our joint expenses). That's straight-forward and the reports Quicken will produce look sensible for our spending. I even realized I can do the Double Entry Thing and zero-out the Cash account by making a balancing entry to the Cash account but with a category of, say, "contribution by DA" so I can see that I made an extra contribution to the joint accounts.
Then we've got instances where one of us paid for something off the joint accounts that's actually a personal expense. So I can make a transfer from the joint bank account to the cash account; then a balancing entry in Cash with a sensible comment and the category of "contribution by DA" and a negative amount, so it's actually subtracting from my contributions.
[This doesn't work properly! Quicken puts the damn cash transfer the wrong way around! It looks like I would've needed to swap every single "Spend" and "Receive" in the Cash account to make transfers work, but then the first case above without a transfer fails!]
The third instance is where, say, dan pays for something that's my expense not joint. Such as when my health insurance was directly debited from his salary. This is a conceptual mess for me. (If I figured this out, I expect I'd probably be more useful when helping settle bills with friends at dinner, too.)
If this were double-entry accounting, I think it would be: a credit to "contribution by db" and a debit from "contribution by DA". It doesn't affect any other joint accounts. The money goes from him to me. That's accurate. Yes?
In Quicken, this looks to me like two transactions in Cash, one with the category "contribution by DA", as an expense, and one with the category "contribution by db" as an amount received.
That makes some sense. And the report comes out OK; but for some reason, for the last decade I've been doing it differently; and I won't even try to explain it because it sounds wrong to me now.
Which suggests what I wrote above helped me figure out that this is the right way to do it.
Right?
I considered just deleting the majority of this post, but I'm not, because it amuses me now.
[And I'm so not amused any more. I still need to know if my logic is correct with the third case; but I also need to know what I should be doing for the second case. Grrr.]
And I want to boot Quicken to the curb.
The first problem with Quicken: exchange rates. It doesn't keep historical rates. When we moved here, the US dollar was worth $1.50 CAD. I put a lot of money in then. Now the US dollar's worth $1.06 CAD. Quicken, amazingly, reports it all at the current exchange rate. OK, so between both of us there are only about 25 contributions in USD of a sizable amount. So I can maybe do them each manually outside Quicken, though I wish there were a way to do that and use Quicken as the authoritative data without setting up parallel "translated" transactions. Ugh how annoying and inelegant.
The next problem is partly conceptual on my part, but Quicken doesn't make it easier. I won't be offended if you skip reading this bit; my eyes glaze over when I try to think about it. My hope is that writing it out will help, and maybe somebody else will be clear enough on it to say "yes, that's right." Here are two simple situations and one that wraps my head in knots: [or, did, before I wrote it out...] [ack. but it doesn't work right. ack.]
We have a Cash account, which I've used if someone pays for a joint expense on a personal account (so, otherwise not recorded in our joint expenses). That's straight-forward and the reports Quicken will produce look sensible for our spending. I even realized I can do the Double Entry Thing and zero-out the Cash account by making a balancing entry to the Cash account but with a category of, say, "contribution by DA" so I can see that I made an extra contribution to the joint accounts.
Then we've got instances where one of us paid for something off the joint accounts that's actually a personal expense. So I can make a transfer from the joint bank account to the cash account; then a balancing entry in Cash with a sensible comment and the category of "contribution by DA" and a negative amount, so it's actually subtracting from my contributions.
[This doesn't work properly! Quicken puts the damn cash transfer the wrong way around! It looks like I would've needed to swap every single "Spend" and "Receive" in the Cash account to make transfers work, but then the first case above without a transfer fails!]
The third instance is where, say, dan pays for something that's my expense not joint. Such as when my health insurance was directly debited from his salary. This is a conceptual mess for me. (If I figured this out, I expect I'd probably be more useful when helping settle bills with friends at dinner, too.)
If this were double-entry accounting, I think it would be: a credit to "contribution by db" and a debit from "contribution by DA". It doesn't affect any other joint accounts. The money goes from him to me. That's accurate. Yes?
In Quicken, this looks to me like two transactions in Cash, one with the category "contribution by DA", as an expense, and one with the category "contribution by db" as an amount received.
That makes some sense. And the report comes out OK; but for some reason, for the last decade I've been doing it differently; and I won't even try to explain it because it sounds wrong to me now.
Which suggests what I wrote above helped me figure out that this is the right way to do it.
Right?
I considered just deleting the majority of this post, but I'm not, because it amuses me now.
[And I'm so not amused any more. I still need to know if my logic is correct with the third case; but I also need to know what I should be doing for the second case. Grrr.]