Change loan payment details in loan account?

DR806

New loan (auto) set up w reminder. Payment is from checking account. Both accounts in same bank. Both accounts set to update w One Step Update. First payment update is successful on both accounts as far as total $. However, actual interest (& principal) need to be edited to correct by a couple of dollars. Easy to do in checking account. Not so in loan account.
1) How is this done in loan account?
2) Or, does it matter that the loan account is slightly off between principal and interest?

Extra details. I have tracked several loans thru Quicken. I have NEVER been able to match the interest & principal between the loan account and checking account without removing the loan from One Step Update (in other words loan becomes manual update only).

NotACPA

Your Auto Loan is, almost certainly, a "Daily Interest Loan".  Where the amount of interest due with your August payment is partially determined by what day in July that payment is received by the lender.

This is in contrast to a "Monthly Interest Loan" (such as a traditional mortgage), where the amount of interest due with each payment can be calculated to the end of the loan (payoff) even before the loan is funded.

A Daily Interest Loan will almost always require adjustments to the amortization.

If you properly record the transaction in the checking account as a split with part going to pay down the principal of the loan (i.e., a transfer) and part going to interest, then you don't need to download the Loan from the bank.  When you get your loan statement for July, just go into your checking account and make the adjustment there which will automatically update the other side of the principal payment and correct the interest expense.

NotACPA

Your Auto Loan is, almost certainly, a "Daily Interest Loan".  Where the amount of interest due with your August payment is partially determined by what day in July that payment is received by the lender.

This is in contrast to a "Monthly Interest Loan" (such as a traditional mortgage), where the amount of interest due with each payment can be calculated to the end of the loan (payoff) even before the loan is funded.

A Daily Interest Loan will almost always require adjustments to the amortization.

If you properly record the transaction in the checking account as a split with part going to pay down the principal of the loan (i.e., a transfer) and part going to interest, then you don't need to download the Loan from the bank.  When you get your loan statement for July, just go into your checking account and make the adjustment there which will automatically update the other side of the principal payment and correct the interest expense.

DR806

Thanks. So what your saying is remove the loan from the auto update by deactivating online services?

Yes, I agree, interest (and therefore principal) are rarely exact in these loans. I already record the correct principal and interest in the split in the checking account the day after the payment. So really, it sounds as if there is no way to update the details of any loan account when it is a 'connected' account; thus it needs to be a manually updated account. (Which is what I've always done in the past. Just thought there was probably a better way.)

Again, thank you.

Chris_QPW

It is actually interesting that this loan doesn't have the right numbers as an automatically updated loan account, since as far as I know it was one of the design goals.

Back before Quicken had the this feature everyone thought that when they finally put in this feature it would work just like other accounts and download just the net amount and the loan wizard would still provide the details.  And of course the user would still accept/review the downloaded transactions like in any other account.

But Intuit surprised people in that they didn't do that.  Instead the loan wizard isn't used and the register is hidden so you can't change anything in it.

The reason for doing it this way was because there was another complaint that people had and that is that the loan wizard couldn't handle all the different kinds of loans the loan companies were coming up with.

So the stated goal was that they would "leave the payment up to the loan company, which should know the right amounts for principal and interest."  Quicken isn't suppose to be calculating the principal and interest, it is supposedly being downloaded from the loan provider.

This was also what lead to them hiding the register, they figured if they let the user change things they could mess it up, and there wasn't any way to reconcile/fix it.