Prevent income from showing as Uncategorized in the Top Spending Categories chart

MikeOnaBike

I have transfers from an IRA to my checking account that I choose to categorize as an income category because the IRS treats these IRA distributions as income. But changing the transaction category from a "transfer" to an income category (on the transactions that are credits in my checking account) causes these transactions to be shown as "Uncategorized" in the Top Spending Categories chart on the dashboard. That renders that chart almost useless because it is now lumping income with spending on the same pie chart.

If I revert the IRA distributions back to "transfers", this fixes the Top Spending Categories chart, but then when I go to the reports section and look at income reports, there is no income shown.

Feature request: Exclude any transaction categorized with an income category from the Top Spending Categories chart.

UrsulaA

I believe the "Exclude any transaction categorized with an income category from the Top Spending Categories chart." is already a feature. Are you sure your IRA income custom category is under the income setting in categories?

Update: @DannyB is right, transfers from investment accounts are treated different and show as uncategorized after all. His post provides valuable insight.

Update 1/16/2024: Can you?

1. Delink the transfers for the IRA and the checking account - make the category just transfer.

2. Make the transfer in the checking account, the positive side, an income transaction with the income category of your choice? Uncategorized will always show in spending report.

Looks like you already did this. Great work!

DannyB

@MikeOnaBike

This was an issue for me since the Transfers & credit card payments section was added to Income after bills & savings last spring.

I worked with @Coach Natalie a few times to try and get this figured out (one such conversation here). I didn't notice the issue you raise with Top Spending Categories, but I don't pay a lot of attention to that widget so not if that came up for me.

In the end, I made my retirement accounts manual (All our retirement accounts, IRAs, Roths, are held at one investment house by our financial advisor and investment manager firm) so I can track the account values but not have to keep the day-to-day transactions up to date. After making these accounts manual, I created a recurring income for our monthly draw which keeps the deposit into our checking account in the Income column.

There may be a way to do this while keeping the investment accounts connected, but I never figured it out.

I guess what I did is technically a work around, but I had planned to make my retirement accounts manual anyway since we are no longer making regular deposits to those accounts as we no longer have "earned" income that we could contribute out of.

@Coach Natalie or @Coach Kristina may come along and have some insights for you or one of the other members of this community may have a better answer for you.

UrsulaA

Update 1/16/2024: If you use Payment/Deposit as the type/action and Dividend Income or Interest Earned as the category, you will see income in reports in the correct spot.

Report page

Thanks for sharing, after thinking about the post, investment transactions behave differently than the other transactions. They do not use the standard categories, but instead an action. See more here.

Even though I am still working, I like seeing my interest and dividend income. I kept the investment accounts connected and created tags for dividend and interest income. If you want to track income, you can create a tag for the transfers to your checking account from your IRA and filter by such in your investment account. In that way, your reporting does not look messy.

Transfers are not supposed to be displayed on any reports.

Example of my div and int tags under investment transactions for last year, using >1/1/2023 as a date filter

IRA contributions

MikeOnaBike

New information and an effective work-around:

I discovered that the transactions that were contributing to the "Uncategorized" pie section of the Top Spending Categories widget were NOT the transfers in my checking account that I had recategorized as income, but rather the OTHER SIDE of the transfer: the transaction in my IRA investment account that was now no longer part of a matching transfer. By editing the transactions in my IRA so that the "Exclude from Spending Plan" and "Exclude from Reports" boxes were checked, the Top Spending Categories chart is fixed, i.e. these transfers no longer contribute to an "Uncategorized" pie section.

This solution works for me because I can now track my IRA distributions as income in all of the income reports, including net income reports.

Thanks to all that spent time on this issue!