For the best expense reporting is it better to download the credit card transactions in a separate

Question

account for the credit card, or in Checking as I pay them.  What are the pluses and minuses to each?  I use the Banking Summary Report

NotACPA · Answer

It is my strong belief that your Q setup should ALWAYS reflect the real world.So, your credit card is, in the real world, a separate account than your checking, and a separate account than other cards.So, setup your account in Q to reflect what's in the real world.Where this sometimes gets a bit tricky is if you have 2 cards, with differing card numbers, on a single credit card account (I have this situation) in which case since I get a single bill, listing all card transactions it's setup as a single account in Q,

Jim_Harman · Answer

@volvogirl you are exactly right. I used to do the big split at payment time and it was a pain in the neck and not very accurate.

This approach makes even more sense if you download the credit card transactions. With judicious use of reminders, renaming rules and memorized payees, I hardly ever need to enter any transactions manually, just verify and accept them when they download.

Ebay, Stripe (for small stores), and Amazon are the biggest remaining challenges when it comes to deciding which category to use for each transaction.

volvogirl · Answer

You need my standard write up......
The proper way is to set up a credit card ACCOUNT and enter the charges into it when the purchase is made and assigning it to a category. Then when you pay the credit card bill you TRANSFER the payment from your checking account to the credit card account (not a category).   Then if or when you download the payment from the bank you match it to the one you already entered.
When you enter the payment in your checking account you put the credit card account name in for the category using square brackets around the name to indicate it is a transfer...like this… [credit card] or newer Mac versions have a separate Transfer column.
I used to do it the wrong way for years!  Then I wised up and now enter them properly. I would split my credit card payment into all the categories on one transaction in my checking account. And since I always pay more than the bill I would need to figure the difference and put it to another category.  But then I needed to have them entered on the date the charges actually happened. So I finally set up a credit card account. It makes it much easier to enter and balance!
And if you split your credit card payment into the categories and some of the categories are Transfers to the same Account  it will lump all them together and make 1 transaction in the Transfer Account.

Here's a list of some other reasons why you should do it this way…..You don't have to wait to make the payment and split it outYou won't run out of split lines (In older versions there's only 30 lines)You can use both the payee and memo fields for more descriptionYou don't have to figure out the difference if you pay a different amountThen your Credit Card Account will exactly match your statementCharges get entered with the right date (better at year end for taxes)You can enter all charges to date, not just what's on the bill - then you can see what you still oweYou won't forget what a charge was for if you enter it right away from the receipt