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Venmo Transaction with Low Venmo Balance

wstewarttennes

I have a Venmo account and a Checking account set up. When I purchase something using Venmo and my Venmo balance is less than the amount of the purchase, the money gets pulled directly from my Checking account and my Venmo balance remains the same.

However, in Quicken, both Venmo and Checking accounts show the same transaction and my Venmo balance becomes off by the amount of the transaction (since no funds were actually used from Venmo). Ideally what should happen is:

1. Checking account is debited amount of transaction.
2. A Transfer is created on the Venmo register with a credit in the amount of the transaction.
3. Venmo account is debited amount of transaction.

Basically step #2 doesn't happen and it causes me to be unable to properly use Venmo.

Thanks!

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jacobs

So you have two expenses and no transfer? You just have to edit one of the transactions -- I would say the one in your checking account, but it would work either way -- to be a transfer instead of a categorized expense. So in your checking account, where there is now a Venmo transaction withdrawing money from the account, edit that transaction's category from whatever it is now to Transfer:[Venmo] so it transfers the money to Venmo; the existing transaction in Venmo is using the money for the actual purchase from the Payee.

You might be able to automate this; I'm not certain. Create a QuickFill rule for Payee Venmo (or whatever the Payee name is in your checking account when money is puled by Venmo), and set the Category to Transfer:[Venmo] with no amount. The next time you download a transaction in your checking account from Venmo, it should apply this rule for the category, turning the transaction into a transfer.

Chris_QPW

It think I understand this because I have seen a similar thing happen in PayPal.
In PayPal it can get even more complicated because depending on what is selected during the purchase it might pull some of the amount from the balance (until it is zero) and the other part from the checking account. And the transactions it will create aren't "complete". As in even though there is a transfer from the checking there isn't any such transaction downloaded.

The basic problem of trying to use QuickFill probably is going to be that this a "sometimes" event. Not to mention if I'm correct the "payee" is going to be different each time depending on what you paying for.

Is there any penalty for always having a zero balance a Venmo?
What I do with PayPal is just never have a balance there and as such all the payments are pulled from my credit card (or checking account depending on what I select when doing the payment) and so I don't even include PayPal in Quicken any more. And the debit from my credit card/checking account can just be categorized like any other payment.

wstewarttennes

@Chris_QPW you certainly understand the issue -- thanks for the input and yes, the issue is that it's a "sometimes" event (only when the Venmo balance is not used to pay for the transaction because it is less than the transaction amount).

I don't think there is a Venmo penalty but I cannot figure out a way to never hold a balance automatically. I could try to transfer out every time I'm paid there but ideally I shouldn't have to do that to make Quicken work properly.

Thanks so much for the input!

Chris_QPW

Oh, I see you get paid in that account. Yeah that makes it harder. The PayPal account can be used for two main purposes. One is for someone that sells stuff, and another is for just using it as a consumer that doesn't want to give out their credit card number at certain places (and of course a combination of both).

When you paid in the account then you really can't ignore the account, at least not easily (you would have to do as you suggest and do transfers out every time money comes in). That was in fact one of my reasons for making my program completely free starting last December. Without people paying me I could switch to having a zero balance for use just as a conduit for me paying at sites I didn't completely trust.

jacobs

@wstewarttennes You marked my reply above Rejected, but I'm not sure why. Per your description (and my limited use of Venmo), there are two types of Venmo purchases:

If the purchase amount is less than your Venmo balance, the purchase is made entirely from your Venmo funds; your checking account is not touched.
If the purchase amount is greater than your Venmo balance, the purchase is made entirely from your checking account funds, essentially transferred from checking and then paid our by Venmo in a single transaction; your Venmo balance is not touched.

Is that correct? And you're downloading transactions into Quicken from both the checking account and the Venmo account, right?

In the first case, the transaction shows up in your Quicken Venmo account, reducing the Venmo account balance and giving you a purchase transaction categorized for whatever the expense was. No problem there, right?

In the second case, the money coming out of checking shows up in Quicken as a reduction to checking, but it's a categorized expense and not a transfer. And the purchase shows up as an expense in Venmo. You want the purchase transaction to be in the Venmo account, so the second part is fine; the problem is that the reduction in your checking account is not, in Quicken, transferring the funds to Venmo. To fix this manually, you simply edit that transaction in the checking account to be a transfer to the Venmo account, rather than a categorized expense. To automate this, you could make a QuickFill rule that a payment to Payee "Venmo" applies a category of the Transfer to the Venmo account. Doesn't this address what in your original post was the missing step #2?

@Chris_QPW You say this is a "sometimes" event, but unless I'm misunderstanding @wstewarttennes, the only "sometimes" part is whether the checking account gets hit for the purchase or not. In terms of Quicken, though, that's not a problem. In all cases, the purchase is recorded in the Venmo account. If there's nothing hitting the checking account, that's call there is to it. If the checking account gets hit, it just needs to be a transfer in Quicken rather than an expense, which is easy to accomplish. (This is unlike PayPal, which will first spend down your PayPal balance and then pull the remainder from checking.)

Chris_QPW

@jacobs Let me clarify one thing. I wasn't saying that Quicken can't "handle" this situation. I was saying it can't handle it automatically (in all cases) as far as I can see. User intervention is going to have to happen on at least one of these situations.

jacobs said:

@Chris_QPW You say this is a "sometimes" event, but unless I'm misunderstanding @wstewarttennes, the only "sometimes" part is whether the checking account gets hit for the purchase or not. In terms of Quicken, though, that's not a problem. In all cases, the purchase is recorded in the Venmo account. If there's nothing hitting the checking account, that's call there is to it. If the checking account gets hit, it just needs to be a transfer in Quicken rather than an expense, which is easy to accomplish. (This is unlike PayPal, which will first spend down your PayPal balance and then pull the remainder from checking.)

Unless I'm mistaken Quicken Mac doesn't allow controlling QuickFill by account, correct?

Well QuickFill is going to be controlled by the payee/memo. And unless I'm mistaken, the payee is going to be the same whether it hits the Venmo or the checking account.
And I might add that this isn't a single payee. So lets say it hits just the Venmo account and the payee is "George". You setup the QuickFill that George gets the category of Dinning. Now the balance of Venmo is to small for your next purchase with George. Now you get two transactions one in the Venmo account and one in the checking account for George. You instantly have two problems. First off George is already mapped to Dinning, so you can't have it automatically pick something else like a transfer in the QuickFill. But there is another problem. If this is just a transfer then you have moved money from your checking account to the Venmo account, but not debited the amount anywhere. Here is where (at least on PayPal) the second problem comes up. There should really be two transactions on the Venmo download. One for the transfer and one for the debit, but there is only one.

At least this is what was happening in PayPal, but note this has more to do with the "download" then it did about what you would see at the PayPal website. As in there were what it considers "internal transfers, and debits" that didn't get downloaded.

wstewarttennes

@jacobs thank you for taking the time to help! The problem isn't that the checking account is marked as an expense, as I already have it marked as a transfer. The issue is that the Venmo account doesn't register this as a transfer, so there is not credit on the Venmo account (see #2 in my original post).

It isn't about categorizing these expenses as much as my total net worth across Quicken is decreasing by double what it should.

One thing that's nice is the Checking account transaction always has the name "Venmo", so I do have it automatically fill as a transfer. But, as I mentioned above, that's not really the issue.

I suppose this is just a problem with the Venmo integration and I am probably just going to remove it for now and just use my checking account. I would love to file a ticket with Quicken if anyone knows how to do that.

jacobs

@wstewarttennes Ah, I might see the disconnect here…

For the checking account transaction, if you have Category="Transfer", that does not create a transfer inside Quicken. It tells Quicken that money is being transferred from somewhere outside the Quicken world, and to not count this transaction as income or expense.

But if you instead set the checking account transaction category to "Transfer:[Venmo]" -- exactly that syntax, where "Venmo" is whatever name you have for your Venmo account in Quicken -- then you will see the transfer out of checking automatically show up as a deposit in the Venmo account. (Alternatively, make the Transfer column visible in your register, blank the Category field, and select the Venmo account in the Transfer column; it does the same thing.) This is what you said was missing in tour original post step #2.

jacobs

Chris_QPW said:

@jacobs Let me clarify one thing. I wasn't saying that Quicken can't "handle" this situation. I was saying it can't handle it automatically (in all cases) as far as I can see. User intervention is going to have to happen on at least one of these situations.

Actually, I was saying I didn't think so. and I see where our reasoning diverges, so let me explain…

Chris_QPW said:
Unless I'm mistaken Quicken Mac doesn't allow controlling QuickFill by account, correct? Well QuickFill is going to be controlled by the payee/memo. And unless I'm mistaken, the payee is going to be the same whether it hits the Venmo or the checking account.
And I might add that this isn't a single payee. So lets say it hits just the Venmo account and the payee is "George". You setup the QuickFill that George gets the category of Dinning. Now the balance of Venmo is to small for your next purchase with George. Now you get two transactions one in the Venmo account and one in the checking account for George. You instantly have two problems. First off George is already mapped to Dinning, so you can't have it automatically pick something else like a transfer in the QuickFill. But there is another problem. If this is just a transfer then you have moved money from your checking account to the Venmo account, but not debited the amount anywhere. Here is where (at least on PayPal) the second problem comes up. There should really be two transactions on the Venmo download. One for the transfer and one for the debit, but there is only one.

For your first example transaction, contained to the Venmo account, you're correct. There's a Payee "George" and it gets categorized to Dining either automatically by a QuickFill rule, automatically by Quicken's auto-categorization, or manually by the user. So there's no problem with that transaction. The Payee is correct, the category is correct.

Now on your second transaction for George, there is a transaction in the Venmo account for the purchase from George, and there is also a transaction in the checking account pulling money for Venmo. Here's the critical part. Based on my limited use of Venmo, I thought -- and perhaps I'm wrong -- that the Payee in the checking account is (or starts with) "Venmo", not George. And that's why I was saying that a QuickFill rule could be created for Payee=Venmo to set the category to be the transfer to the Venmo account*.

And if the next transaction in Venmo is to "Bob", the transaction on the checking account side is still to Venmo, so the rule would work to make the transfer out of the checking account and into the Venmo account. In other words, only one QuickFill rule is needed for the Payee Venmo.

*It might also require a Renaming Rule for keyword=Venmo, to rename any Payee containing "Venmo" to just "Venmo" if transactions come in as "Venmo George" and "Venmo Bob".

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Chris_QPW

@jacobs you are correct, I realized my "mistake" when @wstewarttennes stated that the payee is in fact Venmo in the checking account. Given that they are different, now you have a chance at setting it up automatically.