Queston for Quicken users

[Refresher]

Not familiar with the software but have been playing around with it.

To simplify suppose you have just one checking account ie. BOA and one Visa ie. Chase that you use.

BOA pays rent. electric, cable, etc and also pays the Chase Visa at the end of the month in full. You also take a $100 ATM every month for pocket money.
Chase Visa is used for the supermarket, gas, dining etc.
$100 cash is used for coffee, newspapers whatever.

When you download BOA will be debited for bills and for the amount of the Chase Visa plus the $100.
Chase will show all the transactions and you can categorize them but then the debit is duplicated.
The $100 will show as a debit to BOA and I guess that can be split to categories'.

Seems like it will not balance. Then there's the income part.
Got some ideas but any suggestions?

 

[sailor]

It's best to record as transfer from BoA to Chase account.
Use "[" key in the category list to bring up account name.

 

[audreyh1]

No, there won't be a double debit. If you select BofA as the source for the Chase credit card payment in the "categories" section the transaction will appear in both accounts but be linked. The category for the BofA debit to pay the Chase credit card will be the name of the Chase credit card account. The category for the Chase credit that will show paying off the credit card will be the BofA account. When you enter one transaction and select the other account as the category it will automatically appear in the other account.

 

[Animorph]

I do something a little different with Quicken to make it work the way I want. YMMV.

In your case I'd have liability accounts for rent, electric, cable, and something like miscellaneous for small stuff. Then you enter the transaction in BOA checking and the category is the rent account or one of the others. Technically Quicken considers this a transfer. Effectively it creates a double entry accounting system, or an "envelope" budgeting system. The liability accounts are your budget categories. When we receive income, it goes into the checking account and spread into the budget categories as planned, and of course retirement savings.

This results in a couple of strange things. First, everything should sum up to $0 always. So Quicken always reports your net worth as $0. You can create a report to calculate your real net worth. And if your net worth is not $0 you know you missed categorizing something properly. Second, after you update all your portfolio values, you have to balance them with a matching liability, just like everything else. I have a Saved Stocks liability account that shows my invested amount and balances out invested dollars that aren't allocated to anything else.

 

[rbmrtn]

I download just the checking account info. The CC payment shows there and I use the split function to assign the CC transactions to the proper category.

 

[Refresher]

I download just the checking account info. The CC payment shows there and I use the split function to assign the CC transactions to the proper category.

Do you manually enter each CC transaction in the split?
A months worth can be a lot of entries.

 

[pb4uski]

I would have a VISA liability account and each credit card charge I make would increase the liability account (I owe VISA) and increase the appropriate expense category (for example, Groceries when I use my credit card at the grocery store).

When the autopay of the VISA account happens out of my checking account it reduces my checking account balance and reduces the VISA liability account (reduces what i owe to VISA). Other checks written for expenses are categorized to the appropriate expense. For ATM withdrawals I just have a spending category called "Spending Money" that gets increased and I don't bother to try to categorize what I spend in cash.

Both my credit card accounts and my bank accounts autodownload. Most of the credit card charges I have to categorize the first time I have a charge to that vendor (for example my grocery store) but after that Quicken memorizes the category so I just need to do a quick review of them. The checks I have to do manually but I don;t write many checks so it is not a big deal. My bill pay checks out of my checking account work similar to the credit card charges. The first time I paid my credit card company I had to manually make the offset to the credit card liability account, but after that Quicken memorized that and now does it automatically.

 

[audreyh1]

I download just the checking account info. The CC payment shows there and I use the split function to assign the CC transactions to the proper category.

I also download the credit card transactions. Each shows up as a transaction and gets assigned the right category automatically as Quicken learns the payees. The credit card payment appears when I pay from the bank account, and Quicken recognizes the payment and matches it when it appears in my credit card transactions.

 

[Hermit]

Not familiar with the software but have been playing around with it.

To simplify suppose you have just one checking account ie. BOA and one Visa ie. Chase that you use.

BOA pays rent. electric, cable, etc and also pays the Chase Visa at the end of the month in full. You also take a $100 ATM every month for pocket money.
Chase Visa is used for the supermarket, gas, dining etc.
$100 cash is used for coffee, newspapers whatever.

When you download BOA will be debited for bills and for the amount of the Chase Visa plus the $100.
Chase will show all the transactions and you can categorize them but then the debit is duplicated.
The $100 will show as a debit to BOA and I guess that can be split to categories'.

Seems like it will not balance. Then there's the income part.
Got some ideas but any suggestions?

I enter the CC charges manually, although you can download them and they will be entered automatically. When I get the CC statement, I check off the entries on the statement against the reconcile list generated from Quicken. After the reconcile statement is balanced, I pay the CC from the checking account using an on-line transfer and record it in the checking account with a category of the CC account in brackets as noted before. I do the same process for the checking account. I record paychecks as deposits in the checking account. I put the amount deposited in the entry and then in the splits I start with the total pay as a credit entry and all deductions such as medical and taxes as debits so the entries in the split look just like the entries on my pay statement with all entries attributed to the correct categories. The check deposit is memorized so I don't have re-enter most data.