I & E Report | Category shows 0.00 when there should be an amount

Elaine2

1. credit card pmt made from ckg. and categorized as regular expense, not a transfer.

2. When I generated the I & E report the category shows 0.00 when in fact there should be an amount of $300 showing. (This report is for June, July and August 2020)

* attached PDF shows a split screen between the register and I & E report
** screen shot of the transaction in question.

Went through quicken chat on Tuesday-- we did all of the usual things: created a new category, backup and restore, supervalidate, deleted and reentered the transaction and nothing. I checked the category list to make sure there wasnt anything weird about that. I did a cashflow report-- and it also shows as 0.00

. . I can print a transaction report-- no problem. The transaction shows up there.

Anybody have any ideas about why this is??

Thank you in advance for any insight!

Tom Young

Do you have your USAA Credit Card set up as an Account in Quicken?  If it is then I assume you're not entering any Categories when you post credit card charges to the Account and are fine with just calling all those charges CrCd-Pmt?

If that's all correct then one guess is that over in the USAA Credit Card Account itself you're making an offsetting entry to the CrCd-Pmt Category in order to keep the balance in the Account correct and that USAA Credit Card Account is "feeding" your I & E report, effectively zeroing out the Category.

Boatnmaniac

You are welcome, @Elaine2 .  When I set up a credit card payment for my credit card account from my checking account (I usually do that from my credit card online account) I will enter a manual transfer transaction into my credit card register for that.  Then when the credit card payment transaction has posted, both the credit card and the bank will download that transaction (into the respective registers) and Quicken does a pretty good job of matching them to the previously entered manual transfer transaction.  It's pretty slick.

Tom Young

Do you have your USAA Credit Card set up as an Account in Quicken?  If it is then I assume you're not entering any Categories when you post credit card charges to the Account and are fine with just calling all those charges CrCd-Pmt?

If that's all correct then one guess is that over in the USAA Credit Card Account itself you're making an offsetting entry to the CrCd-Pmt Category in order to keep the balance in the Account correct and that USAA Credit Card Account is "feeding" your I & E report, effectively zeroing out the Category.

Boatnmaniac

@Elaine2 - If @Tom Young is correct (I suspect he is), then you can confirm this zeroing out in the CrCd-Pmt category by pulling up an Itemized Categories report which should show the details.

You might want to consider using a transfer from your checking account to your credit card account, instead.  A credit card payment really is not an expense (although I know it sure feels like it!).  The expense was created when you used the credit card to pay for things and that is what you want to be shown in your I & E reports.  A transfer from your checking account to your credit card is simply a cash asset transfer to pay for the purchases you made with your credit card.

Elaine2

Hello Tom-- Thank you for this reply.

Based on reply I tried a couple of things:

* unchecked the USAA Credit card account in the I&E-- and the $300 shows up in the repoprt. But!-- then the charge on the credit card doesn't show up.

*. . .By *NOT* including the category CrCd-pmt category in the I&E report, the transactions of both payments and charges appear uSAA cr card account and therefore the payment TRX *is* in fact accounted for.

I hope this makes sense. I think this is what you were saying.

Elaine.

Elaine2

Thank you "boatmaniac"-- for your reply as well!

You make an excellent point!

Back in the dark ages of Quicken, I stopped using the transfer between accounts function because if would completely [removed] up the reconciliation process. So you were now-- not only out of balance on checking account but the credit card account.

That problem was resolved when quicken improved and it became easier to balance. When the transction downloads-- it is treated as a transfer. So for the next calendar year-- I will convert back to that default.

many thanks for your timely reply!! -- Elaine.

Boatnmaniac

You are welcome, @Elaine2 .  When I set up a credit card payment for my credit card account from my checking account (I usually do that from my credit card online account) I will enter a manual transfer transaction into my credit card register for that.  Then when the credit card payment transaction has posted, both the credit card and the bank will download that transaction (into the respective registers) and Quicken does a pretty good job of matching them to the previously entered manual transfer transaction.  It's pretty slick.

Elaine2

Hello-- and thank you! 

I will print this out and visualize it try it out. 

BTW-- do you prefer your avatar name or do you have a regular name. It's just a courtesy I think-- to refer to people by their given name. : -) 

Glad I was able to solve this cunundrum today.

Be well and be safe! and thank you again.

Boatnmaniac

@Elaine2 - People get to select their user names when they set up their Community account and it's best to refer to them when posting here by their selected user names, if for no other reason than to let everyone know who you are directing your question or comment to.  Some people select their given names, others select their email address (NOT recommended) while others prefer to use something fictitious for a variety of reasons, whether it's because they prefer to remain anonymous or because they want it to communicate something about themselves.  If someone doesn't like being referred to by the user name they have selected they can ask one of the Moderators to change it to something else.  I selected Boatnmaniac because I like boatin' and my wife sometimes calls me a maniac (lovingly, I hope ).  Put the 2 together and voila...Boatnmaniac!  The avatar is just something that I think fits well with that. 

In Community, if you put "@"  before the person's user name it will send a notification to that person that they have a message or that someone has referenced you in a post.  So, to keep a discussion in a post thread alive it's best to put that symbol before the person's username.