[moneydance] account specific categories

[Tom Metro]

Richard Hyde wrote:
> No, categories can't be tied to specific accounts.
>
> Categories can be deeper than two levels...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...

This is what I did. It doesn't, however, address the problem of making 
the category pop-up specific to the account. So even if I set the 
default category to Business (expense) in the business account, I have 
to wade through all the personal categories to get down to the Business 
income categories.

I considered creating a single Business parent category, and putting 
both expense and income subcategories under it, but 1. I wasn't sure it 
would let me do that, and 2. I'd have to choose either expense- or 
income-type for the parent category, and one of the two would be wrong 
half the time.

What I really want is to be able to declare a new node at the same level 
as "My Finances" and instead have it be Business, where all the business 
accounts and categories would go under it. Then on the account creation 
page, the same way you choose a default category, you could choose a 
default category hierarchy. (In fact the existing functionality would 
mostly do the job, but ideally it'd be a separate option such that I 
could chose the Business hierarchy (making the personal categories 
hidden from view) *and* specify a default category for transactions 
within that account.)


> You could also use multi level categories in two trees...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.

I'm perfectly OK with that limitation. Generally I wouldn't want to do 
reporting that combined the two areas. For the most part they are 
isolated. If it were not for the fact that money gets transferred 
between business and personal checking accounts with some regularity, 
the easy answer would be to just use two separate data files.


> You can't tag a category but there are a couple of other options.  
> A third way is to use tagging on the transactions.

OK, but that seems to require additional data entry for each 
transaction, even if the category is already unique to the purpose.


> Hope this has given you a few ideas,

Thanks. It was helpful in confirming that I wasn't missing any existing 
features.

I'll file an enhancement request in Trac.

  -Tom