This topic provides detailed information about the categories and tags that you can associate with your transactions.
It is important for you to associate categories with your financial transactions. This is because categorized transactions drive key features such as reports, graphs, tax reporting, and budgets.
Tags add another layer of classification to help you manage your transactions and view reports. Although optional, they are useful in many situations. Learn more about categories, tags and the differences between them.
Categories
Customize categories to fit your needs
Quicken provides a comprehensive list of default categories that has been developed over many years. The list covers the needs of the typical household such as common spending, income, investing, etc. However, you have the option to customize the category list to fit your specific needs. You can create new categories and subcategories, rename existing ones, or delete the ones you don't need.
That said, we recommend that new customers start by using the default categories. This is especially important when you are using connected services to download transactions. These downloaded transactions are automatically categorized so you do not need to manually categorize transactions. Using the default category list will result in better automatic categorization. As you become more familiar with the capabilities of Quicken and you start having different needs, you can create new categories.
Finally, don't worry about something going wrong. Quicken makes it easy to bulk re-categorize many transactions at once, or change your existing category structure.
Create new categories
You have the following options to create new categories:
- When entering a new transaction: Enter the name of the new category in the Category field. The new category is automatically created when you save the transaction.
- In the Category field, click Edit Categories.... In the Categories window, select New Category. Provide the required information and click Save.
- In Quicken, choose Window > Categories and create a new category as described in the above option.
Once the new category is created, you can associate it with your transactions. If the category is for a tax-related income or expense, you can optionally assign tax line items to categories, which will then be used to populate the Tax Summary report.
Create new subcategories
You have the following options to create new subcategories:
- When entering a new transaction: In the Category field, enter the name of the top-level category followed by a colon : and the name of the new subcategory. The new subcategory is created within the top-level category when you save the transaction. For example, Entertainment:Concerts, where Entertainment is the category and Concerts is the subcategory.
- In the Category field, click Edit Categories.... In the Categories window, select New Subcategory. Provide the required information and click Save.
- In Quicken, choose Window > Categories and create a new subcategory as described in the above option.
Once the new subcategory is created, you can associate it with your transactions. If the subcategory is for a tax-related income or expense, you can optionally assign tax line items to categories, which will then be used to populate the Tax Summary report.
Remove unused categories and subcategories
Quicken provides a comprehensive list of default categories and subcategories. However, if you are not using some of them, you can remove the unused ones from the list. To do this:
- In Quicken, choose Window > Categories.
- In the Categories window, click the Action icon .
- Select Remove Unused Categories.
View unused categories and subcategories
At some point in time, you might want to add a transaction with a category that you have not yet used. If you are not sure if it is available in the category list, you have the option of viewing all the unused categories and subcategories in the list. To do this:
- In Quicken, choose Window > Categories.
- In the Categories window, click the Action icon .
- Select Show Only Unused Categories. A list of all the categories and subcategories that you have not yet used are displayed.
To restore the complete category list, deselect the option Show Only Unused Categories.
Re-arrange your categories
Quicken gives you the flexibility to change a category to a subcategory and vice-versa.
If you are using mobile and web sync, we recommend that that you do a sync just before and immediately after re-arranging your categories. This is to avoid any conflicts later and to ensure that you get the updated categories on your mobile.
- In Quicken, choose Window > Categories.
- Drag and drop one category into another to make it a subcategory.
- Drag and drop a subcategory out of a category to make it a top-level category.
Tags
Learn about creating, editing and deleting tags to fit your needs.
Create new tags
You have the following options to create new tags:
- When entering a new transaction: In the Tag field, enter the name of the new tag. The tag is automatically created when you save the transaction.
- In the Tags field, click Edit Tags.... In the Tags window, select New Tag. Provide the required information and click Save.
- In Quicken, choose Window > Tags and create a new tag as described in the above option.
Remove unused tags
Quicken provides a comprehensive list of default tags. However, if you are sure that you will not use some of them, you have the option to remove them from the list. To do this:
- In Quicken, choose Window > Tags.
- In the Tags window, click the Action icon .
- Select Remove Unused Tags.
View unused tags
To see if you have tags that are not currently used (not associated with an transactions):
- In Quicken, choose Window > Tags.
- In the Tags window, click the Action icon .
- Select Show Only Unused Tags.
To restore the complete tag list, deselect the option Show Only Unused Tags.
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