Understanding Quicken's Direct Connect

[gindie]

On June 1, I will become our church's treasurer. I have been training with the current treasurer since the beginning of the year.

Currently, Quicken is being used. I realize that QuickBooks could also be a useful tool, but I want to keep things the way they are for at least the short-term.

The one exception is in the area of bill payment. The current treasurer is paying ALL bills by printing and mailing paper checks. I, on the other hand, have been using electronic bill payment for over 25 years for my personal payments, starting with the original dial-up CheckFree.

I see that the church's bank, PNC, offers something called Quicken Direct Connect. This allows downloading of transactions into Quicken and Bill Pay at no additional charge. (Quicken's own Bill Pay is 9.95/month).

I have questions, if any of you use the Quicken Direct Connect feature with your institution:

1) In the PNC instructions, it says that a new Quicken Account needs to be created. Does that mean that the Quicken account currently containing the church's transactions will no longer be used and all future transactions will be part of this new account?

2) I don't understand this concept/advantage of Downloading transactions from the PNC account into the Quicken register. Won't transactions already be in my register when I manually enter a bill payment or deposit?

If anybody could answer the above, or give me a short description of how things would be different between the current manual, paper way of doing things in Quicken as opposed to the Quicken Direct Connect way, it would be greatly appreciated.

 

[pb4uski]

I don't use Direct Connect because I'm cheap.

I use web connect and if I have already entered the transaction, it will show up as matching a downloaded transaction and I give it a quick review and accept it.

I order checks using my credit union's online bill payment system, it gets downloaded into Quicken and I check that it is properly categorized and accept it and that is it... this way I don't need to do any entry at all. For recurring bills, like my mortgage payment, utlilities, etc. I have a scheduled transaction that I record and then when the bank transaction is downloaded it matches up and I accept it. For checks written the old fashioned way (which are few), I either enter it when I write it and it matches up when it clears the bank and is downloaded or (for those DW writes) it shows up as a downloaded transaction and I complete the requisite information (date written, payee, category) and record it.

I would try web connect to start to see if it fits your needs as you can always go with Direct Connect later if you want.

 

[Senator]

1) In the PNC instructions, it says that a new Quicken Account needs to be created. Does that mean that the Quicken account currently containing the church's transactions will no longer be used and all future transactions will be part of this new account?

2) I don't understand this concept/advantage of Downloading transactions from the PNC account into the Quicken register. Won't transactions already be in my register when I manually enter a bill payment or deposit?

I use Quicken Home and Business, for almost 30 years I have used Quickbooks. If you have Quicken, it will do most anything you need it to do.

1. You still use the local copy of the Quicken file. You should be able to add on-line connectivity to an existing account. There is no need to add an account. Go to the Account List. Edit. Look for the connection tab. Set it up. If you add a new account, your transactions will be set up in two different accounts.

2. If you manually enter the transactions, there is no need for on-line connectivity. You can still connect and manually match transactions, or accept some, or all of them. If you do both, you will have double-entered all the transactions. I manually do most of mine. That way, when I reconcile, it's my entries compared to the banks, not the banks entries compared to the banks.

 

[bUU]

That way, when I reconcile, it's my entries compared to the banks

Effecting the same kind of assurance that reconciling a bank statement by hand used to offer.