How to reconcile a line of credit on Quicken for Mac

Bryan Schmiedeler

I have entered a "Line of Credit" account in Quicken for Mac. I recently had an entry in this account which is offset by an entry in my checking account. I went to reconcile the line of credit account and oddly enough Quicken shows I need to enter an adjustment entry, which would make the balance equal to my line of credit. I kind of understand why it wants to do that, but that's not what I want, obviously.

Any way to "fix" this?

UKR

Assuming that your Line of Credit is $10,000 ... Did you enter this amount as the account's Opening Balance?

The account needs to be opened with a $0 balance. When you take money from the LOC, it's recorded as a transfer from LOC to your Checking account, resulting in LOC showing (for example) $-1000 and the Checking balance increasing by $1000.
To reconcile at end of month, use the Statement Ending Balance, which probably also includes an Interest charge as a separate transaction. That Statement Ending Balance should be the amount you actually owe, + interest, - payments already made, e.g., $-1020, not $-10000.

UKR

Assuming that your Line of Credit is $10,000 ... Did you enter this amount as the account's Opening Balance?

The account needs to be opened with a $0 balance. When you take money from the LOC, it's recorded as a transfer from LOC to your Checking account, resulting in LOC showing (for example) $-1000 and the Checking balance increasing by $1000.
To reconcile at end of month, use the Statement Ending Balance, which probably also includes an Interest charge as a separate transaction. That Statement Ending Balance should be the amount you actually owe, + interest, - payments already made, e.g., $-1020, not $-10000.

Bryan Schmiedeler

That is what is so unusual about this. I believe that I did open it with a zero balance (I cannot remember now).

Quicken says my online balance is $-3550 (my LOC is 4K and I took out $450).

If I reconcile it wants to make an adjustment for a - 3100.00 giving me a balance of $3550. But that is how much I have in the LOC, not how much I owe.

Is it possible that Commerce Bank just does it this way?

UKR

> Is it possible that Commerce Bank just does it this way?
Or might it be possible that Quicken looks at the wrong data field as Online Balance?

If you haven't done so already, I'd say it's time to call Quicken Support on the phone and request help.  Let them do a screen share session with you to review a download log file on your computer, to determine the nature of the problem and to figure out how to fix it.

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Bryan Schmiedeler

I got on a chat with them. They said there wasn't much I could do, except manually reconcile. So I will do that. Thank you for your assistance.