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Automatically Split Utilities Between Home Office and Personal? (QuickBooks Online)

Forum|Forum|9 months ago
September 16, 2025
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I have a home office where 100% of my income is earned in this home office. I’ve been splitting utilities such as the electric, gas, phone, ISP, and ADT Alarm by a percentage. The percentage I count toward my home office is the square footage of my home office divided by the square footage of my home (times 100).

I don’t believe there’s an automatic way to do this in QuickBooks Online - but it doesn’t hurt to ask.

At the moment I’m manually splitting every instance of all shared utilities associated with my home office. I use an Excel spreadsheet to calculate the dollar amount.

As an example of how I’m splitting the cost of utilities goes like this:

In bank transactions I select “Pending”
I click on a given payment sent to a given utility
I click “split”
Using the drop down I enter the categories (two categories)
Using an Excel spreadsheet I enter the dollar amount. I programed an Excel to split the payments by percentage.
I enter in each amount that Excel calculated for my home office and personal home
then I click post

If I have 5 utilities then I’d need to repeat the above 12 x 5 = 60

This is cumbersome.

There’s got to be a better way. (or so I hope)

Any thoughts and/or ideas?

QuickBooks Online

Best answer by Jv_D

Hello there, Peter. We appreciate your time and effort in splitting the cost of your utilities manually. Let’s work together to find a way to automate this process.

To begin with, you can use the Bank Rules feature in QuickBooks Online. It automates income and expense tracking by matching transactions, assigning categories, and splitting line items.

Here's how to set up bank rules:

Navigate to Accounting, then pick Rules.
Click New rule in the upper-right corner and enter a name in the What do you want to call this rule? Field.
In the Apply this to transactions that are ▼ dropdown, choose Money in or Money out.
From the in ▼ dropdown, select a bank or credit card account, or All bank accounts.
Specify the rule's conditions. You can set a single rule with up to 5 conditions. Set and include the following, then click + Add a condition.
In the Conditions fields, pick whether the rule applies to Description, Bank text, or Amount. Then, choose Contains, Doesn't contain, or Is exactly to decide how QuickBooks applies the rules.
Click the Transaction type, then the +Add a split to add more split details, and choose whether Percentage(%) or Amount($) under Split by.
Select Category, Tags, and the Payee to apply. Then, Save.

Once done, QuickBooks automatically applies your rules to bank transactions in the Pending tab. For it to work effectively, ensure all the details provided are correct.

Keep us posted if you have other questions about managing utility expenses. We'll be around to help.

J

Jv_D

Answer

QuickBooks Team

Hello there, Peter. We appreciate your time and effort in splitting the cost of your utilities manually. Let’s work together to find a way to automate this process.

To begin with, you can use the Bank Rules feature in QuickBooks Online. It automates income and expense tracking by matching transactions, assigning categories, and splitting line items.

Here's how to set up bank rules:

Navigate to Accounting, then pick Rules.
Click New rule in the upper-right corner and enter a name in the What do you want to call this rule? Field.
In the Apply this to transactions that are ▼ dropdown, choose Money in or Money out.
From the in ▼ dropdown, select a bank or credit card account, or All bank accounts.
Specify the rule's conditions. You can set a single rule with up to 5 conditions. Set and include the following, then click + Add a condition.
In the Conditions fields, pick whether the rule applies to Description, Bank text, or Amount. Then, choose Contains, Doesn't contain, or Is exactly to decide how QuickBooks applies the rules.
Click the Transaction type, then the +Add a split to add more split details, and choose whether Percentage(%) or Amount($) under Split by.
Select Category, Tags, and the Payee to apply. Then, Save.

Once done, QuickBooks automatically applies your rules to bank transactions in the Pending tab. For it to work effectively, ensure all the details provided are correct.

Keep us posted if you have other questions about managing utility expenses. We'll be around to help.