Can I originate my credit card charges in the account I will be paying them from?

llissa

I'm so frustrated I cannot figure out how to word this so I can find what I'm certain is an easy answer.

Personal banking user.

Background: I have one credit card, and I charge both personal and family items on it. I pay from two checking accounts, personal and family. I don't prefer having all the purchases together, I really like parsing them and visually seeing them in the account they are paid from.

I don't have two credit cards yet, which would solve this. But how can I do this now?

I see where credit card transaction should be in the credit card account, and then a transfer made from the (checking) account I will pay from.

But I want that purchase detail in the account I'm paying from - can I do this backwards? I tried, entering the charge in the account it will pay from, then using the category of the credit card account, and it populated beautifully over in the credit card account with a payment line item ready to go, but I lose the ability to categorize the charge then to the proper expense category.

Basically, I want two categories columns! One to link to cc, one to categorize in expense type.

In any help you give, please use the example that I buy shoes for me for $5 (personal account), and food (family account) for $10, on the same credit card.

Thank you!

Sherlock

If the edition of Quicken you're using supports tags, you could tag the transactions as personal and family in the credit card account.  You may want to review the built-in documentation on the subject: press F1  

Sherlock

If the edition of Quicken you're using supports tags, you could tag the transactions as personal and family in the credit card account.  You may want to review the built-in documentation on the subject: press F1  

Tom Young

This seems like the hard way of going about capturing information that should be easily captured in the credit card Account, but certainly you can do this, if you insist.

In the personal checking Account you enter a Payment of $5 for the Category "Shoes."  You immediately reverse this payment with a subsequent transaction that makes a $5 deposit the the personal checking Account with the offset being the credit card Account.  This combination of entries has no dollar affect on the checking Account, as it should because you didn't really use the checking Account to buy shoes, and creates a liability of $5 over in the credit card Account.

For the food purchase you do the same thing, buy "Food" in the family checking Account and then immediately create a reversing entry moving the $10 purchase to the credit card.

All these credit card purchases will have no dollar effect in the checking Account when the subsequent "reversing" entry is made and the credit card liability should match (or be reconcilable to) the credit card statement when it shows up.

Way, way too complex in my opinion, but "doable" if you're willing to put in the work.

llissa

Thank you for taking time to reply!

I posted in Newbies so you can presume I'm not familiar enough with the program to know all my options. If it's all together in the cc account, how would I see this more clearly? A report, maybe? To me it's complicated to have it all in one view.

llissa

Sherlock, I will play around with the idea of tags, thank you. As I asked Tom Young as well, as a newbie, is it that I don't understand how to read the info in the cc account? What is the easiest way to visually see the parsing out?

Tom Young

I almost suggested using Tags over in the credit card Account to separate charges between personal and family but it seemed like you were adamant about seeing this information in the checking Account so I replied to your direct question.

When you create a transaction in Quicken, or any accounting program for that matter, you classify that transaction in a way that's meaningful to you such that you can generate reports that give you the information that you want. 

If we are dealing with "expense" transactions - shoes and food in your example - then we select an appropriate "Category", like maybe the Category called "Groceries" for the food and a Category called "Clothing" for the shoes.  Having done this then we can run a Spending report for any period we select and see how much we've spent on Groceries and Clothing.

In Quicken Categories can have Sub-Categories and the use of a Category/Sub-Category combination attached to a transaction can serve to classify a transaction at a finer level of detail.  So in your example, and using the Categories "Groceries" and "Clothing", you could attach the Category/Sub-Category combination of "Groceries:Personal" to the $5 transaction and attach the Category/Sub-Category combination of "Clothing:Family" to the $10 transaction.  Doing so would allow you to run reports that would spell out the detail and the totals associated with how much was spent in each Sub-Category.

In addition to Categories and Sub-Categories Quicken provides yet another way to classify transactions by using "Tags" to further "earmark" your transactions.  So instead of Sub-Categories of "Personal" and "Family" you could instead use Tags of "Personal" and "Family" and run reports on the credit card Account that would give you the information you want to see.

So what's the difference between Categories and Tags?  The difference largely comes down to how the Quicken program controls them and allows you to use them. 

In the case of Sub-Categories you must establish the relationship between each Category/Sub-Category combination before you are allowed to use them in a transaction.  So using our example two transactions you'd need to establish the Sub-Categories of "Personal" and "Family" with the Category "Groceries" and then do that again with the Category "Clothing."  Each time you selected either one of these Categories to use, Quicken would show you the available Sub-Categories, and you could select either.

Tags, on the other hand, are largely uncontrolled by the program.  You can create them on the fly and use them with any and all Categories, or forget to use them at all. 

If you're only dealing with one credit card Account and might have transactions that use lots of different Categories, then I'd say Tags are the way to go here.  Even if you forget to use the Tags with some of the transactions that fact would be completely obvious to your when you run a Spending report on that Account, subtotaled by Tag, at which point you could go back to the transactions missing Tags, and add them to the transactions.