Track credit card rewards

GPO

It would be nice if we could have "linked" accounts to track rewards in credit cards.

There are few type of rewards money (cash back), points (membership rewards, hilton, etc) or miles.

There are few patterns as well, usually based on category, sometimes this category can change quarterly. Just let us update the rules/criteria and points/miles/% per dollar each period and keep accumulating this items and showing them along with the linked account.

This way we could track and add transactions in case of redemption.

jrf40

Great suggestion. Would be great to project what our rewards should be for a month as we categorize expenses with the credit card. Charged item number 1 is in a 2% category and the expected reward can be anticipated in the separate rewards account, charged item number 2 is in a 3% category, etc.

I love the idea that categories can have an associated % reward that can easily be tracked and adjusted during each period.

Great idea!

NotACPA

NO NO NO, there is NO dollar amount associated with reward card points (or airline/hotel points) so they don't belong in your Q data file.

Track these in a spreadsheet.

jrf40

I disagree. First, many cards offer cash back, monthly or annually. Obviously, cash back does have a dollar amount. Second, reward points do have value in that spending them will save $$ on hotel rooms and airline rooms, so I respectfully disagree. Especially when I purchase two tickets and use points for a third. I know exactly how much I value them in $$. I'm currently tracking them by manually entering them in a separate unlinked account with a self-created currency. Quicken is the perfect place to track these and it would be great if the points earned could be connected directly as GPO suggests above.

jrich75

I can see the benefit of tracking certain types of rewards in separate accounts but believe the process of linking them to a credit account would become unmanageable. As the OP stated, the rules for receiving rewards can vary greatly and change frequently.  Discover Card is a good example of a complicated award system.  You would have multiple cash back categories that would change at least quarterly and generally not match up well with established categories (e.g. Club Warehouse?).

If you want track awards in Quicken, why not just set up a separate account and enter the awards whenever they accrue? It is generally when the statement comes in and you need to reconcile accounts anyway,  I do this for Discover Rewards since I use them frequently for Amazon purchases.  I just enter a deposit for "Earned this Period" as reported on the statement.  Then I can use those funds to offset the cost of items purchased later.  This seems much easier to me that having to update the award rules frequently and it does not become a new feature that Quicken Support has to deal with (we have enough of those already). 

NotACPA

And the value (what you can actually buy) with Points varies greatly.  They behave more like a security than cash.

BUT since there's no pre-determined cash value for points, they still don't belong in Q.

Chris_QPW

If I could vote against this I would.

To me it isn't if the rewards have a dollar amount or if you can't somehow shoehorn them into an account.  The real issue is what @jrfaris points out.  There isn't any system to get this information automatically.  And the rules of how they accumulate and de-accumulate (yep return something and the points go away) are way to complicated and varying to setup a system in Quicken to calculate them.

So you are back to manually tracking them.  And as @jrf40 pointed out you can already do that.

The last thing Quicken needs is another complicated system that "sort of works".

Ninguno Solsticio

@Chris_QPW said:
"There isn't any system to get this information automatically.  And the rules of how they accumulate and de-accumulate (yep return something and the points go away) are way to complicated and varying to setup a system in Quicken to calculate them."

That pretty much sums it up. And since Quicken can't keep up with all the issuers, at best it would come up with a flexible, programable rule-based system for your Sunday night pleasure and entertainment. Imagine that YOU, the user, will have to digest all your many credit cards individual and ever-changing rules and then program them into Quicken (if it offered this option), account by account. Good luck with that.

Not to mention that you buy gas hoping to get 3x the points, but because the business has a grocery or convenience attached, you only get one. Now go figure that. In Quicken.

Instead, I've created an account called Cash Rewards (I disfavor miles - hard cash is my thing) and simply let the card issuers themselves do that math. In this account, I have a transaction line for each credit card, and I chose to categorize these transactions as Other Income.

Every so often I visit the issuers' websites, check the points, convert them to ca$h (typically just divide by 100), and then in Quicken simply adjust the value of each of these "transactions" to reflect updated amounts, without creating new transactions. The account balance at the bottom then reflects my entire trove of rewards, which in turn adds (slightly) to my Net Worth. That works well because I let points accumulate for a while before cashing them out.

When I do cash them to either check or to pay the credit card itself, I freeze the original balance and add another transaction with the same credit card name/number (I use their last 4 digits as tags, as well - this allow me to report on 'rewards by card' later), but with the cash-out amount as a decrease. And that updates the account bottom line while keeping records of how I used the rewards.

Chris_QPW

@Ninguno Solsticio Sounds like a good way to track it.

My system is even simpler.  I don't count my money until I get it.  
And yeah, me too, cash is what I want.

So every once in a while I log into by credit card account and select for it to give me the cash back and as a credit card "credit".  These come in with a payee of "Redemption Credit", which I have a memorized payee for, and have the category of Cash Rewards (no tax line).

dmullig

Good suggestions, and I'll probably use a category for Cash Rewards. What I wonder is if cashback rewards should be applied to an existing category. For example, for one card, we use it mostly for groceries. So would it be a good idea to use the Grocery category instead of Cash Rewards? It would be harder to track the rewards, and it would probably skew the Grocery category for that month.

As for tracking rewards, I read a tip last year to use a separate application for that, and their suggestion was https://awardwallet.com/. I'm using it, mostly to make sure any rewards I have don't expire unknowingly.

dgcoonesq

I carry my rewards points for airlines, etc., as assets, one for each rewards program. I update these manually from time-to-time. It would be terrific if I could just download them. I imagine it is pretty pie-in-the-sky to think that this could be arranged but I'm wondering if anyone else would appreciate this feature?

[Merged Post]

Karyl Wilson

I am working on estate planning and the points do have a value. I have used them to buy over $1500.00 in merchandise. I just recently wanted to account for the points in quicken. It would be great if Quicken had "memo accounts" to account for quantity and not dollars. I would like to track miles on my car, meter readings on utilities, and usage on utilities so you can make comparisons without price changes. This can be used to make projections. When I retire I will be home more, will use more utilities. I will drive less. (Geeky I know.) I would also like an inflation report in Quicken. We are going to need that for next year to compare with what the boss says inflation rate is to what it actually is.

UKR

Not since MS Money in the early 2000's have there been Frequent Flier Miles accounts.

I concur with some of the other "against" - votes and, if I could, would vote against it, too.
Trying to support something like this in Quicken would be like opening a

It would, IMHO, become yet another never ending nightmare, like Online Biller support, Syncing a data file to the web, disappearing paycheck split detail and other long-standing never fixed issues.
Let's give the Quicken programmers a break and let them work towards fixing and improving what's already in Quicken.

Quicken Anja

Hello All,

The Community Support team regularly reviews long-standing posts and Ideas for relevancy and current interest. This Idea seems to have stalled and we would like to gauge the current interest in this request. 

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UKR

Still a NO - vote from me.

There's no standardized interface to exchange data between card issuers and Quicken to get useful data for each reward transaction, so how would one go and assign points correctly to each one? There's also no download capability in existence for these transaction details.

Try setting up an offline investment account register, with a "security" for "Costco VISA card cash rebates" and then manually record Buy or Add transactions for each purchase you make:

• 4% for gasoline up to $7000/year in purchases, then 1%
• 3% on restaurants and (eligible) travel
• 2% on Costco purchases
• 1% on everything else

How do you compare / reconcile your data entry to the card statement?
How long would it take before you throw in the towel and say "Forget it. It's not worth the trouble."?

DaveAx

As a future enhancement to Quicken, I would like the ability to track and download activity and balances in loyalty programs such as those offered by airlines and hotel chains.
Quicken's ability to collect and organize financial data would be quite useful here, eliminating the need to visit multiple websites to stay up to date.
This would also offer Quicken Inc. some new options in the realm of co-marketing.

jacobs

[reply not needed after being merged into this thread]

Quicken Anja

Hello @DaveAx,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community with your request.

I went ahead and merged your Idea to this active Idea thread regarding this topic.

Ideas are reviewed by our Development and Product teams to see what features people would like to have available in the future. Please, be sure to add your own vote as well by clicking the up arrow (see example below).

Thank you!

DAVIDBOYD3504_1

I also have a similar need to track airlines, hotel, credit card, etc Rewards points. I've added it as an account in the "Property & Debt" category but it carries the amounts as dollars and inflates the assets. I'm aware that someone else commented that it should not be entered into Quicken but maintained on a spreadsheet. I'm just trying to centralize my data and spoke with Quicken today and of course they don't have a fix for this issue but told me they have posted in the notes that are periodically reviewed by Quicken for potential update in the future.

[Merged Post]

Jim_Harman

If you mark the account as Separate it will not affect your net worth and other reports.

[Merged Post]

Doug Giannotti

You would think with all of the Credit Card Rewards / Frequent Flyer miles out there quicken would create a proper way to handle this instead of using an investment account hack, MS Money had this feature.

[Merged Post]

Chris_QPW

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20326930#Comment_20326930

If you are talking a manual account of some kind then that is "reasonable", but what people don't really seem to get is that just because something appears on lots of websites, that doesn't mean that there is a systematic way to get at that information. And that Quicken Inc is in no position to dictate to these financial institutions on a standard to accomplish this.

One of the worst things Quicken Inc can do is try to do stuff like this ad hock. It just leads to a half done, problematic complaint system.

rismanma

I track all sorts of rewards in Quicken and have done so for years.

For the ones that I use frequently, I have created additional accounts in Quicken for cash. For the ones I don't use as frequently, I don't bother.

Some are tracked in dollars (like Rakuten rewards, Upromise, for example). Others don't (like hotel, airline, Amtrak, and rental card rewards). Still others are a fixed percentage, like cash-back credit card rewards, CVS ExtraBucks, etc). For the "others" and "still others", I've created foreign currencies for those. This makes for some interesting tracking, for sure

The advantages are, first, I'm already tracking finances in Quicken, so it kind of goes along with it. Second, I can use existing Quicken features like reconciling, finding & reporting, and transfers to my existing bank accounts (especially by using splits, like I spent X dollars at store Y, and I redeemed an award from account Z, so that goes as an additional split line item which is a transfer from account Z)

Alas, none of the reward accounts offer Quicken download, but maybe someday

In any case, if Quicken could automate at least some of this, it may be helpful.

To implement it, I don't think Quicken needs to learn rules about every reward program or offer downloads from every (or any?) reward program. Just whatever common rules make sense, and then it's up to the user to handle the rest manually.

Forensics5

Now that Bask Bank offers an account (it's not new… been out at least 3 years) that pays in American Airline miles in lieu of interest, it seems Quicken should add a feature to track Miles and Points. Even if the user has to manually track these numbers, it would be nice to have a tab for it. As anyone that's gotten a divorce and had to split miles and points knows, there is a dollar value assigned to them.