Tracking Shared Expenses In Quicken
When you have roommates or a significant other that you often share expenses with, how do you track them? You can have an arrangement where one person pays the electricity bill and the other one pays gas, or perhaps you pay 50/50 on everything. If you are always playing the balancing game, trying to keep things even, it gets even hairier to track.
My girlfriend and I have been living together for several months, so we have been playing that game. About the time we moved in together, we came across a nifty website called BillMonk which is fantastic for helping us keep our shared finances straight. With BillMonk, if we go to the grocery store, I can enter the total bill and say that we split it 50/50, or 50/50 minus the stuff I bought for myself, and it works really easily. It allows us to see who owes whom and how much.
Now that is all good and well for a solution for tracking our expenses in one place, so that we can each see it and easily update it, but I want more! I have been tracking my finances in Quicken for several years, but for the most part, it has been just my expenses alone. Shared expenses makes tracking and budgeting difficult - for example, if I buy all of the groceries, but Megan paid the electricity bill, Quicken says that I went over budget in the groceries category, but I am under budget in electricity. That leads us to the question:
How do you track I.O.U.’s in Quicken?
I have been dinking around with this for some time, but I have not been able to come up with a good solution until this past weekend. Most of the inspiration came from this post on the Quicken Community forums.
- Set up an asset account in Quicken (I named the one I have “Megan”) The way to think about it is that the part of a split bill that you have paid for your partner is now an asset of yours - a debt for them.
- Enter a split transaction into Quicken in the account you used to pay the bill. If I paid for the $40 grocery bill, Megan now owes me $20. I would enter that transaction as follows:
Category Amount Groceries $20.00 [Megan] $20.00 Entering [Megan] sets it as a Transfer to the asset account named Megan, you can think of it as a transfer to the Bank of Megan - having a positive balance means she owes me money, negative means I owe her.
- Now, let’s say the next week, she pays for groceries and the bill is $50, I would enter it into Quicken as follows in the Megan asset account:
Payee: HEB Grocery Decrease: $25.00 Category Groceries Make sure that the amount goes into the correct column (Decrease)
Now the balance on the account is going to be -$5.00, I owe her money
If you are really anal-retentive, you can do this for everyone that owes you money, or just do one big account with Memos for each person.
Let me know if this works for you or if you put your own spin on it!
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