Accounts vs. Categories
I'm used to a system where there can be multiple Accounts in a File, and where transactions are labeled by Categories. This is how Quicken works. It also seems to be how MoneyDance works, so that's great.
However, I'm confused about reports. When I choose Income and Expenses and try to edit the report, I have the option of selected All Accounts, specific Account Types or specific Individual Accounts. But these options seem to give me choices of Categories instead of Accounts. So... a couple questions:
-Am I missing something or is the terminology inconsistent? Actually, I'd say inconsistent would be a massive understatement since Account actually seems to mean something completely different.
-Is there a way to view only certain Accounts in a report? And my Accounts I mean, say, a specific Credit Card Account or a Specific Bank Account (as opposed to a type of transaction category)?
Thanks in advance for any help/advice.
Support Staff 2 Posted by Ben Spencer on 25 Jan, 2010 07:09 PM
Behind the scenes Moneydance (and Quicken for that matter) are double entry book keeping systems. In double entry book keeping everything is an account, be it an asset a liability an income or expense they are all accounts. Most non accounting people have a hard time thinking of income and expenses as accounts and so Moneydance represents them in the register with the word category. People tend to have an easier time thinking that they are categorizing a transaction as income or expense. Here is an example if I create a transaction in my checking register for $10 and select the category. "Entertainment" what is actually happening is that I am moving funds from the checking account into the "Entertainment" expense account. The value of the checking account goes down and the value of the expense account goes up. Income and expense categories are actually accounts that are used for the balancing entry in a transaction that is an income or expense.
Many of the reports (though not all) allow you to specify that you only want to see transactions that come from a particular asset/bank account. Specifically what type of report are you trying to generate.
Sincerely
Ben Spencer
3 Posted by owangolama on 25 Jan, 2010 09:09 PM
Thanks for the reply, Ben. I understand the concept that you're describing. Though, as you rightly point out, not having accountant training does make it more difficult (or at least somewhat counterintuitive).
My confusion stems from seeing the same entity called Categories in one place and seemingly Accounts in another place. I think that adds to the confusion which already exists for non-Accountants. I.e., it seems that perhaps by trying to dumb it down for the rest of us, you may have created an inconsistency. All this said, I wouldn't be surprised if there's something I'm missing simply because I do not understand all the subtleties involved.
Anyways... what I'm trying to do is to create a report of annual P&L (or income and expense). I'd like to include some "Categories" and some "Accounts." To be clear, by "Accounts" I mean bank accounts, credit cards, etc. (rather than classifications). And by "Categories" I mean classifications (like groceries, pet, etc.).
Is this possible with your Income & Expense report? If not, is it possible with a different type of report?
My second question is now just out of curiosity. Since you accountant types want to call everything an account, what is the terminology you use to distinguish between things like bank accounts and categories?
4 Posted by john phillips on 27 Jan, 2010 05:50 AM
I switched from MSMoney last year and have the same problem. There is a trac to vote for this feature '2523'. In the meantime the only way I can see to achieve this is to assign tags to the transactions of categories you want. To do this in retrospect use the excellent find and replace extension. You can then filter by tag on individual bank accounts in the transaction report.
I still think reports should be flexible enough to do this without tags, as you have to add a tag manually to every new transaction, there doesn't seem to be any memory of previous entries in respect of tags.
Support Staff 5 Posted by Ben Spencer on 27 Jan, 2010 03:46 PM
The income and expense report does not have an option to limit the report to a sub set of the bank accounts. I believe John is correct that the only way to do this would be to tag all the transaction in a particualr account and then filter the report by tag. I really like the suggestion ticket John refers to. Here is the link to it:
http://moneydance.com/trac/ticket/2523
If you register and long into trac you can vote on tickets. The more votest suggestion tickets get the more likely they will be implemented.
Us accountant types refer to bank accounts as a type of "asset account" and categories as income and expense accounts.
Sincerely
Ben Spencer
6 Posted by owangolama on 04 Feb, 2010 03:39 AM
Ok, thanks. Voted for ticket. Closing thread.