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Spending reports double counting

steven rudnick

If I include cc payments in the spending reports, it double counts a lot of items of course. How do I keep the category but exclude it from the spending report by categories graph.

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Accepted answers

Jim_Harman

To build on @GeoffG's comment, it sounds like you have an expense category called "cc payment" or something and your credit card payments are being assigned to that category.

The correct way to enter a credit card payment is as a transfer from your checking account to the credit card account. This will reduce your checking account balance and add to your credit card balance (making it less negative), which is exactly what is happening in real life.

Transfers do not have a category assigned in Quicken, so the payment will not be double counted in your spending reports.

You should go to your Reminders and/or Memorized Payees list and edit the entries for your credit card payments to use the transfer as the category.

If you use a Reminder to enter the payment, the transfer will aleady be in both registers before it is downloaded, so it should match the downloaded transactions and thus will not be entered twice.

All comments

splasher

How is it double counting?

I categorize my CC purchases and the Checking->CC payment is a transfer which does not categorize it as anything.

Please explain how your situation causes a double accounting.

GeoffG

When you make a payment for a credit card, you want to show the payment from the checking account to the credit card account, not a category.

So as an example $100 from [Chase checking] to [Citibank Visa], would show a reduction in the Visa balance, but not an expense. The [ ] are accounts.

steven rudnick

Actually, Quicken assigned the payment from checking to cc payment - not me. It does it with all four of my credit card accounts. Double counting because it shows as a payment which duplicates the charges in the cc accounts.

steven rudnick

And I do not want to show it as a reduction in the cc account because this shows automatically in the update and it would double count that.

GeoffG

steven rudnick said:

Actually, Quicken assigned the payment from checking to cc payment - not me.

That is incorrect. Quicken suggests a category based on a number of factors, all within your control. Memorized Payees controls how categories get assigned.

steven rudnick

You may think that but I did not actively assign the category. That is also not an answer to the problem.

Jim_Harman

steven rudnick

If you do this, the one-step update will deduct the payment twice, I think.

splasher

steven rudnick said:

If you do this, the one-step update will deduct the payment twice, I think.

If you are not entering any of the transactions manually and relying completely on the downloads, you just have to make sure that when you accept the second account that you match the transaction to the system generated one caused by the first download.
It works for me month after month with no duplicates created and definitely no doubling of my expenditures.

Jim_Harman

The options in Edit > Preferences > Transfer detection will probably affect this. I have "Scan downloaded transactions for possible transfers" checked and "Automatically create transfers when detected" selected and it works flawlessly for me.

q_lurker

steven rudnick said:

If you do this, the one-step update will deduct the payment twice, I think.

It is really a question of timing. I enter the cc payment in my checking account register when I make that payment electronically. The transaction goes in as a transfer to the cc account in Quicken, which then by design enters a parallel transaction in the cc account register. When I later download (via OSU) the cc transactions after the cc has recorded the payment, that payment comes into Quicken and the program recognizes the payment reported as received at the cc as the payment previously entered. In may case these are always "Matches" but it is possible that it may show as a "Near Match".

By getting the Match right, there is no duplication. The second option (which I don't think I have ever needed to do) is to simply delete the duplicate non-transfer entry.