how to utilize a loan in Quicken once account is added

Question

I've used Quicken for many years but now I'm doing something I've never tried entering before - having a little trouble figuring out how to execute it.

So I just obtained a loan for $10K. I've gone into Quicken and setup a new loan. All the terms are entered and it shows up properly -- principal, interest, payment schedule, etc. But what I've done is added $10K of debt into Quicken without entering the corresponding $10K of cash -- for instance, I have three credit cards configured in Quicken with about $8K worth of debt on them and the remaining $2K of cash will be deposited into my checking account. How do I go about entering these cash deposits so that reports will work correctly? I see that the $10K loan appeared with the category "Adjustment". Do I simply enter a $2K "Adjustment" line item into my checking account for that cash, and corresponding amounts into my credit card accounts as well?

FYI - using Quicken for Mac and I have all my accounts setup manually (none of them are connected to online access). I prefer to do all my record keeping by hand.

jacobs · Accepted Answer

In many cases, when you start a loan in Quicken, it's for an asset you don't track in Quicken, such as a car or a house or education (student loan), so you take on the liability of the loan, but the offsetting asset doesn't appear in Quicken. In this case, though, it sounds like you received $10,000 in cash -- so you're correct that you do need to account for the cash you received.

You can do this is a couple ways...

1) You could just enter a $10,000 deposit in your checking account, and use the category Adjustment so this deposit doesn't affect any of your report categories.

2) The slick way to do it is to go to your loan account and click on the Payments tab. The first transaction is the Loan opening balance, which currently shows a Category of Adjustment. Instead of Adjustment, you'd like this to reflect that this $10,000 opening balance was transferred to your checking account. This loan register screen doesn't have a Transfer column -- but you can still make it a transfer.* In the Category field, type this left bracket character: [
* Then select your checking account (or whatever account received the $10,000 deposit from your loan). So if your checking account is called "ABC Bank Checking", you'd see "[ABC Bank Checking]", and after you press Return to re-save the transaction, it will show as "Transfer:[ABC Bank Checking]".
* Now if you look at your checking account, you'll see a transaction for  Loan Opening balance as a $10,000 deposit into your checking account. Perfect!

If you subsequently use some of that cash to pay off your credit card account debt, you simply do it as you do any credit card payment: a transfer to the credit card account, decreasing your checking balance and decreasing your credit card balance.