Payment Transfers counting twice in Budget

jessdevo

I have my car loan and mortgage accounts linked and have it set up so that payments made show as a transfer to those accounts so I can better track how I am paying them down.  However for my budget those payments are somehow canceled out because they look like both a payment and a deposit, so those payments are not accurately represented in my spending budget.  How can I fix this?  Can I not have those accounts linked?

jacobs

@jessdevo I don't understand Quicken Harold's reply at all, but what you describe is a well-know issue with Quicken Mac. It's one of the top three requested areas for enhancement, and the Quicken Mac product manager has said they will address this later this year. As you correctly describe, the problem is that the transfer out of your checking account into your loan accounts don't show up in your budget because the two sides of the transfer cancel each other out. From a purely accounting standpoint, this is actually correct: you haven't incurred an expense, you have transferred funds from an asset to a liability. But you, like most Quicken users, want to be able to budget on a cash flow basis, since those loan payments feel to you like expenses. The solution will be having some way to selectively exclude accounts so that only one side of the transfer transaction is reflected in your budget.

In short, you're not doing anything wrong, and there is nothing Quicken Support can help with; it's simply a limitation of the budget functionality in Quicken Mac at this time. Hopefully we'll see an enhancement to handle this sometime later this year. Meanwhile, since most people typically have just one or two loan payments a month, you either need to remember to manually add that amount to your budget, or you can export the budget to a spreadsheet and add your loan payment amounts there.

Quicken Harold

Hello jessdevo. Appreciate your question.

You should have a transfer from the checking/savings account that points to the linked loan and deducts from the outstanding balance. These will show with the corresponding withdrawal and deposit in a report (Category Summary or Transaction Report made within Quicken.)

if they are not there, we might to look into the issue further with the assistance of Quicken Support. They will be able to look at the situation and work towards a resolution.

Hope this helps. Please let us know if you have any questions.

Respectfully,
~ Quicken Harold.

jacobs

@jessdevo I don't understand Quicken Harold's reply at all, but what you describe is a well-know issue with Quicken Mac. It's one of the top three requested areas for enhancement, and the Quicken Mac product manager has said they will address this later this year. As you correctly describe, the problem is that the transfer out of your checking account into your loan accounts don't show up in your budget because the two sides of the transfer cancel each other out. From a purely accounting standpoint, this is actually correct: you haven't incurred an expense, you have transferred funds from an asset to a liability. But you, like most Quicken users, want to be able to budget on a cash flow basis, since those loan payments feel to you like expenses. The solution will be having some way to selectively exclude accounts so that only one side of the transfer transaction is reflected in your budget.

In short, you're not doing anything wrong, and there is nothing Quicken Support can help with; it's simply a limitation of the budget functionality in Quicken Mac at this time. Hopefully we'll see an enhancement to handle this sometime later this year. Meanwhile, since most people typically have just one or two loan payments a month, you either need to remember to manually add that amount to your budget, or you can export the budget to a spreadsheet and add your loan payment amounts there.

jessdevo

Thank you @jacobs I was starting to feel like I'm crazy!  I will just delete my mortgage account since I can easily track the payment progress on the website and will export my car loan to a spreadsheet.  This was very helpful thank you!

jacobs

@jessdevo You can still leave these accounts in Quicken if you want to be able to see your debt balances along with all your assets in one place -- they just won't show up in your budget. But if having them in Quicken then creates more work than value for you, you're exactly right to simplify!