[moneydance] account specific categories

[Richard Hyde]

Hi Tom,

Tom Metro wrote:
> I'm using Moneydance 2008 (build 603) and I'm wondering if there is a 
> way to create account specific categories. Or at least hide some categories.
>   
No, categories can't be tied to specific accounts.
> Another poster today mentioned the idea of tagging categories as 
> personal or for a specific business, but I don't recall seeing such an 
> ability on the category creation dialog. It seems the better way to come 
> at this problem is from the account perspective, so you generate a 
> report for all categories, but only transactions for the selected 
> accounts. I saw some reports permitted selecting accounts, but not the 
> reports I wanted to use (income and expenses by category). They only 
> permitted category selection.
>   
You can't tag a category but there are a couple of other options.  
Categories can be deeper than two levels, so you could for example 
create a structure like Automotive->Fuel->Business and 
Automotive->Fuel->Personal.  Each transaction for fuel can then be 
recorded as either a personal or business expense whilst retaining the 
possibility to report on how much you'd spent on Fuel as Moneydance will 
sum the totals from the subcategories.

You could also use multi level categories in two trees, one for business 
and one for personal (Business->Automotive->Fuel, 
Personal->Automotive->Fuel) which would allow you to have a different 
set of categories for Business and Personal, but looses the ability to 
easily report across the trees, should you want to see the total you 
spent of fuel, for example, regardless whether it was a business or a 
personal expense.

A third way is to use tagging on the transactions. Each expense could be 
tagged as either a personal or business expense and reports can then be 
run based on transactions with the specific tag.  I use this as I have 
multiple vehicles and tag spending against each one so I know what each 
car is costing me to run.

Hope this has given you a few ideas,

Richard