Should my bills be entered as Transfers if not paid via Quicken?

JerHalf

Please don't tell me I'm using Quicken wrong when you read the following. I have used Moneydance for years (after MS Money quit supporting downloads from my bank). Now I have the same problem with Moneydance so I now only have Q as an option. I do not/will not pay bills via Quicken. My bank has one-stop-shopping for me. I use my bank's bill pay service (free) to pay what I need to or have set up auto-pay with my various billers. With that in mind, how do I set up my Bills & Income reminders in Q so that I can enter the transactions I KNOW will happen in the future/have already occured and I need to merge with the transaction generated by the Q's bill reminder? Instead of a recording a "bill" in Q, do I enter it as a recurring "transfer"? I just subscribed to basic Q as of Saturday and am about to pull my hair out after entering all my bills, downloading activity from my banks and seeing now easy way to merge the two things to show the bill has been "paid". When I try to change a transaction in, let's say, checking, to show that it actually went to [biller name], it creates a duplicate that's no longer "cleared" and the dreaded red pencil appears. Or, I massage the entry further and the trans disappears, but I think a ghost it still there. I want to be able to see on the calendar that upcoming bills have been paid (go grey as registered/paid), but I'm obviously doing something very wrong based on the fact that the bills on the calendar are still there. Long and short of it... I really only want Q to be a glorified electronic ledger.

Sherlock

I suggest entering recurring bills in Quicken using a bill reminder.  If you haven't already, you may want to review: https://help.quicken.com/display/WIN/Create+a+bill+or+income+reminder

Note: When we enter a bill reminder, the transaction is entered in the payment account's register, the current bill reminder is marked as paid, and the date the bill reminder is due next is incremented..  When the transaction is imported from the financial institution, it should be matched to the transaction entered.

The payee field is the name of the biller.  The category is type of the expense.  For example, Rent. 

Note: The payment to a credit card is usually entered in the payment account register with a category that transfers the payment to the credit card account register. If the name of the credit card account register is credit card 1, the category used would be [credit card 1].

There are many ways we may view transactions and reminders in Quicken.  There is a Calendar view (press Ctrl + K) that may be customized to include the specific account register's transactions and reminders.