tax prep: need to report based on account and category
Hello InfiniteKind,
First: I love MoneyDance and have been using it for years. Thanks for a solid product.
Every year at Tax time I become a bit frustrated in the reporting options. I wonder if I'm missing something; an option for a report by Account AND Category. After looking at reports that could be related and searching online in the knowledge base, I can't find a way to run a report that will let me generate for / by both account and category. IE: I need to generate a report for my Credit Card tied to any "Health:..." Category. Unfortunately, I see I could sort this by "Tags" but that does not meet the need for the more general category.
I don't use the tags very often, so I could possibly duplicate the Catagory as a Tag, but that will require a ton of work. I would really like to see a report that will let you generate something like I need, OR an option to duplicate the Catagory as a Tag. Maybe you all know how to generate a script I could run to copy / paste the Category into the Tag as a "band aid" approach?
Whatever you come up with as a reply will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Dan Neville
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1 Posted by Stuart Beesley ... on 30 Jan, 2026 06:23 PM
You probably need the income and expenses report. With transfers turned on and then careful selection of accounts and categories to get transfers to appear as you want them.
2 Posted by ~Nev on 30 Jan, 2026 06:49 PM
Thanks for the reply Stuart,
I've done that report with and without the transfers and it still doesn't give me a very clean out put. Another option I've used in the past is the "Transactions" report, selecting only the top lever Healthcare category. No matter which report is used, I have to take the output to Excel and then clean it up. It's not easy, but it's worked.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious or need to start using MoneyDance differently. But, I don't understand why the option to sort by "Tags" is there when that is very likely and almost always going to be different when the categories one remains constant. It would make a lot more sense to have categories as a filter option than the "tags" line. Even then, without the option of including an "Account" dependency, one still has to export it and then sort all the data to get what is needed for tax purposes. Doing that without the Account's is also a royal time consuming pain.
Ideally having a account and category sort / output would give a concise output needed without a lot of external editing. I would like to see how others use the category and tag line. I may be doing it all wrong. I don't think this is that unusual.
3 Posted by Stuart Beesley ... on 30 Jan, 2026 07:06 PM
what about extract_data extension. Load the data into excel and filter in there?
4 Posted by dwg on 30 Jan, 2026 08:09 PM
I am curious as to why you would need a tax report based on Category AND Account. I find it difficult to imagine a different tax treatment based on what account an expense is paid from. Well, at least in the Personal finance world.
5 Posted by ~Nev on 30 Jan, 2026 09:46 PM
I had not known about the extract_data extension. I've just installed it and will see if I can figure out how to use it. Any tips are welcome.
As to why I need this, that's a fair question. The reason is that my 93 year old mother lives with us and I've been taking care of all her finances as well as ours. She has a couple of different credit cards she/we uses/use for her expenses. So effectively I have 3 different accounts, 2 hers, 1 ours, that use the top category "Healthcare" with subcategories. If I can only sort on her card accounts, I have to do that twice, and then I have to sort out the "Healthcare" related ones. If I use a Transactions report, and sort on "Healthcare", I then have to sort between her accounts and ours.
Up until a couple of years ago, I was also helping a couple of our children with their taxes and this was an issue then too.
I hope that makes sense.
6 Posted by dwg on 30 Jan, 2026 10:02 PM
Yes, managing other people's finances in the same file tends to create problems, not something that Moneydance is particularly designed to do.
7 Posted by dwg on 30 Jan, 2026 10:24 PM
You may have to use tags and then in the reports use those as a sub filtering mechanism.
8 Posted by dwg on 31 Jan, 2026 02:03 AM
You can select the source account(s) in the I & E reports.
9 Posted by ~Nev on 31 Jan, 2026 06:51 PM
Yes, I know / see you can select the accounts in the Income and Expense report. Unfortunately, this does not let one further filter with the category. So, the report still requires a lot of further editing once exported. Again, a simple filter option letting one pick the account AND category can't be much harder than including the "Filter by Tag" option that is offered.
10 Posted by ~Nev on 31 Jan, 2026 07:07 PM
SOLVED! I found that using the Income and Expense report lets one chose the account/s AND then selecting the "Show: Individual" option lets one select the individual categories. This is exactly what I needed.
My suggestion for the Infinitekind staff / programmers would be to make that option more obvious! It does not look like the others listed above the main box. The others all have a drop down arrow. Therefore I didn't realize it was a select-able menu.
11 Posted by dwg on 31 Jan, 2026 11:33 PM
It sounds like the responders were misreading your problem, we rarely think of that since using that selection is second nature.
Another options it to mark certain Categories as "Tax Related" then select to use only categories marked as that in the report.
System closed this discussion on 02 May, 2026 11:40 PM.