Transaction Report Ruined--Credit Card Payments Can't be Splits!!

lgonick

I enter a credit card payment as a single transaction, as it would appear in a traditional check register. Then I detail the individual payments to vendors as lines of a split. Each vendor is identified in the corresponding Memo/Notes field. This field used to be displayed in a Category Report--but no longer!! Now a Transaction Report shows ONLY THE CREDIT CARD COMPANY as the payee. This is useless!!! I can't see where the money went!!!!! Please restore the Notes/Memo column to the Transaction Report ASAP!!!

jacobs

First, you can easily add the Memo/Notes column to a Transaction report. With the report open, just click View > Columns and check Memo/Notes. The column will now be visible in the report. Done.

Second, I always hesitate to tell fellow Quicken users they're doing something wrong, because we all find different ways to use the software. In the case of credit cards, you have indeed found a way -- but it's really not the way Quicken is designed to work, and it greatly limits what you can do with the data you're entering.

Here's a better way to deal with credit cards in Quicken…

For a credit card from XYZ Visa, create a new Quicken account, which you would then see in the left sidebar, under your checking account. Click on that account in the sidebar to view a register for that credit card. In this register, record each credit card transaction individually.

When the time comes to pay the credit card, in your Quicken checking account, record a payment to XYZ Visa: the amount would be the amount of the bill you paid via EFT, and the Category would be a transfer to your credit card account -- which would simultaneously reduce the cash in your checking account and reduce the balance due on your credit card account.

Why is this better? First, you don't have unwieldy transactions in your checking account with many, man split lines which are hard to scan and correct when needed. Each transaction is dated on the date of the purchase, not the date of the credit card payment. Each credit card purchase is its own Payee, so you can easily run a report of purchases from, say, Amazon or Home Depot, instead of just getting a list of all the transactions which contain those names in the Memo field. Your credit card account in Quicken will always show your running balance, and you reconcile it when you get your monthly statement, just like you do with your checking account. You can enter transactions during the month instead of in a batch transaction when you pay the bill. If you ever decide to download the credit card transactions from your card company, you're already using the correct set-up to make that a simple change from entering the transactions manually. You have more space to record notes about each transaction than you do if the first thing in the notes field is the name of the company your charged the transaction from. there's more, but hopefully you get the idea… there are a host of benefits to having your credit card as a separate account in Quicken, rather than recording all the detail in a checking account transaction.