Personal Budget Download, how to get the best result?
My small business's books are kept in Quickbooks (I head a competitive
intelligence/research firm w/no employees outside of my husband and
me). I've kept personal accounts in Quicken Home & Business
(primarily for download capabilities for credit cards.) My husband
has just LLC'd his business (he's a professional musician) and we're
discussing where to keep his accounting (I presume we'll select
Quickbooks).
Question:
How best to track our overall budget?
Do we need to set up 3 budgets: household, his business, and my
business -- along with some way to tally up the three?
Complications: For some household bills, our respective businesses
picks up 1/3rd of the tab as we have home offices. So our expenses
are split across 3 sets of books and our business income first pays
business expenses before flowing through to our personal accounts.
I'm inclined to set up a simple spreadsheet with columns for overall
monthly total and totals for each 3 categories, but it seems crazy not
to use the reporting/category mechanisms of Quicken/Quickbooks. I've
considered importing info from Quickbooks to Quicken, but it doesn't
flow in that direction. Should I import personal accounts into
quickbooks? It doesn't have the investment tracking and I don't
believe (unsure here) whether it will download personal checking and
credit card data into the program.
I've been puzzling over this for hours today . . . any suggestions?
While QB can track all of the stuff you want, you will loose the personal
finance options you mentioned. It will however let you setup all 3 and track
budgets by each class (2 business & 1 personal).
Each seperate legal entity should have seperate data files in my opinion,
then reimbursement in between for the portion of shared expenditures.