Credit card payments showing as 'Money In' in reports

Kate Pravera

I have two credit car payments that are properly categorized as transfers, however they are showing up in Money In, which skews everything. How can I correct this please?

jacobs

My suggestion is to not use the Category "Transfer" (or the subcategory). At all. Ever. It only causes confusion. I wish Quicken didn't even put it there, because of the confusion it creates. (The only use for that category is for a user who does not track their individual credit card charges at all, and simply wants to reflect money coming out of their checking account.)

Since you (correctly) have your credit card expenses in a credit card account, the payment transaction from your checking account uses the Transfer column, not the Transfer Category. In the payment transaction, you select the credit card's account in the drop-down for the Transfer column. You should see something like this:



In this example, I have a credit card account in Quicken called "My Credit Card". Notice that this is shown in the Transfer column. Quicken also shows it in the Category column, using the special bracket notation you see here, where it is labeled as "Transfer:[My Credit Card]". And notice that the Amount value is negative, since it is money out of your checking account.

If you switch over to your credit card account, you'll see the flip side of this linked transfer:



Here, the Amount is positive, because this is a payment to this credit card account.

Now your account balances in both accounts should be correct, and when you run the Category Summary report, this payment transaction should be at the bottom, under the Other Transactions > Transfers Between Accounts heading and subheading.

That all said, I'd encourage you to use "New Report" instead of "Category Summary" as you go forward. All the named reports under New Report on the Reports menu are old reports which were inherited from the 2010-era predecessor product, Quicken Essentials. Over the past two years, the developers have been working on an all-new reporting engine. They've been making incremental improvements to it, but still aren't done, and currently all the power is hidden under the simple-looking "New Report" option on the report menu. From that one command, you can generate many types of reports, and customize them more than the old reports. If you want a simple list of all transactions by category this year, for instance, you'd do New Report, Transaction, Select Rows=Category. then you can click Customize to change the date range, or which accounts or categories are included; you can also add or hide columns, rearrange the columns, and on the Print dialog box select Scale to Fit -- all features which don't exist on the old-style reports. This new category report will not include transfers at all -- just income and expenses.

Write back if anything doesn't make sense!

jacobs

First, let's make sure I'm on the same page as you. Where are you seeing the payment as Money In? Is this on a Category Summary report? Is it listed as its own category of Transfer there?

I'm sorry if this all sounds obvious, but let me ask a bunch more questions...  Do you have a separate credit card account in Quicken, where you record your individual credit card transactions? And then you have a payment in your checking account as a Transfer to the credit card account?

In your checking account register, do you use the Amount Column, or the separate Payment and Deposit columns? If Amount, is the payment of the credit card bill showing as a negative number in the Amount column? And the balance in your checking account declines with the payment transaction?

I'm thinking you will answer no to one or more of these questions. I can create a transaction which appears in the Money In section, but only by doing a few things "wrong", so that's why I want to dig into how you have your accounts set up and how you have this payment recorded.

If yes to all of the above, it sounds like the transaction is correct, and we can zero in on the report showing the payment as Money In. What report are you using?

Post back, and I'm sure we can get to the bottom of this.

Kate Pravera

Yes, it is category report for April. Under the heading Money In, the first category is Credit Card Payment, which is a header that has multiple credit card payment transactions. I double checked and 'credit card payment' is set up as a subcategory of Transfer. Yes, I have a separate account for credit card transactions. I did NOT have it set up as a transfer out of checking, and adjusted that. The actual transactions are gone from "Money In' but the total with the heading Credit Card Payments is still there under Money In. I tried refreshing the page. Next: my check register uses "amounts". One credit card payment in my check register is shown with a negative. I'm looking for the other one now. I'll keep working through your questions until I am able to resolve this or else report back that I could not. Thank you!

jacobs

My suggestion is to not use the Category "Transfer" (or the subcategory). At all. Ever. It only causes confusion. I wish Quicken didn't even put it there, because of the confusion it creates. (The only use for that category is for a user who does not track their individual credit card charges at all, and simply wants to reflect money coming out of their checking account.)

Since you (correctly) have your credit card expenses in a credit card account, the payment transaction from your checking account uses the Transfer column, not the Transfer Category. In the payment transaction, you select the credit card's account in the drop-down for the Transfer column. You should see something like this:



In this example, I have a credit card account in Quicken called "My Credit Card". Notice that this is shown in the Transfer column. Quicken also shows it in the Category column, using the special bracket notation you see here, where it is labeled as "Transfer:[My Credit Card]". And notice that the Amount value is negative, since it is money out of your checking account.

If you switch over to your credit card account, you'll see the flip side of this linked transfer:



Here, the Amount is positive, because this is a payment to this credit card account.

Now your account balances in both accounts should be correct, and when you run the Category Summary report, this payment transaction should be at the bottom, under the Other Transactions > Transfers Between Accounts heading and subheading.

That all said, I'd encourage you to use "New Report" instead of "Category Summary" as you go forward. All the named reports under New Report on the Reports menu are old reports which were inherited from the 2010-era predecessor product, Quicken Essentials. Over the past two years, the developers have been working on an all-new reporting engine. They've been making incremental improvements to it, but still aren't done, and currently all the power is hidden under the simple-looking "New Report" option on the report menu. From that one command, you can generate many types of reports, and customize them more than the old reports. If you want a simple list of all transactions by category this year, for instance, you'd do New Report, Transaction, Select Rows=Category. then you can click Customize to change the date range, or which accounts or categories are included; you can also add or hide columns, rearrange the columns, and on the Print dialog box select Scale to Fit -- all features which don't exist on the old-style reports. This new category report will not include transfers at all -- just income and expenses.

Write back if anything doesn't make sense!