Projecting balances with auto-payments

Gus F

I never pay monthly bills manually. All of them are automatically deducted from either my checking or credit card accounts by the billers. (Yes, I trust them and I have never had a problem with this.) Likewise, my credit card balances are automatically deducted from my checking account. All of these will happen at specific due dates within one month in the future. I also have projected deposits such as salary at specific dates which can be estimated, but may actually vary slightly between pay periods.

Is there an easy way for Quicken to recognize these due-dates and automatic payments ahead of time, before they occur, so that I can get a projected future balance on my credit card and checking accounts over the coming month without manual entry, just by doing a One-Step Update?

Chris_QPW

What might work is using the Online Bill (presentment) linked to a reminder.

But say might for some good reasons, since I have tried it in the past and gave up on it.
The idea is simple enough, the Online Bill checks to see what the bill is and sets the next instance of the reminder to that amount.

In practice though it gets a lot fuzzier.  First off doing this removes any of the estimate options on the reminder.  Second for some billers they go into "Awaiting Next Bill" mode and you might end up with a next instance of the reminder set to zero.  Also the two choices are paying the balance or the minimum.  If that doesn't fit into what you do, then this won't work for you.  P.S. would avoid "Bill Payment" at all costs, I'm only talking about "Bill presentment".  And of course the number won't be right until the bill statement close, at best it will be the last payment.

But on top of this even a reminder that is has the right statement ending amount if you have any returns in the period between the statement closing date and the payment date, that amount won't be right because your payment will be reduced by the amount of the returns.

So the Online Bill presentment would work best with a bill like your utility bill that might vary, but unlikely to be exactly match all the time for an active credit card.

So there is a trade off of wanting to predict the expense in the projected balance vs not having it and having to manually match/correct the transaction/reminder amounts.

Sherlock

I suggest you create reminders for these scheduled transactions.  The reminders enable Quicken to project account balances.  An easy way to create the reminder is to use a transaction in a register as a template: right-click on the transaction and select Add reminder  

Gus F

Unfortunately, reminders don't automatically match with future transactions. The key point here is "automatic". One I set up a future payment, I don't want to have to update or maintain it each month.

Sherlock

Gus F said:

Unfortunately, reminders don't automatically match with future transactions. The key point here is "automatic". One I set up a future payment, I don't want to have to update or maintain it each month.

They do automatically match.   Of course, if the wrong amount is entered, when you import the transactions they won't match.  

Chris_QPW

What might work is using the Online Bill (presentment) linked to a reminder.

But say might for some good reasons, since I have tried it in the past and gave up on it.
The idea is simple enough, the Online Bill checks to see what the bill is and sets the next instance of the reminder to that amount.

In practice though it gets a lot fuzzier.  First off doing this removes any of the estimate options on the reminder.  Second for some billers they go into "Awaiting Next Bill" mode and you might end up with a next instance of the reminder set to zero.  Also the two choices are paying the balance or the minimum.  If that doesn't fit into what you do, then this won't work for you.  P.S. would avoid "Bill Payment" at all costs, I'm only talking about "Bill presentment".  And of course the number won't be right until the bill statement close, at best it will be the last payment.

But on top of this even a reminder that is has the right statement ending amount if you have any returns in the period between the statement closing date and the payment date, that amount won't be right because your payment will be reduced by the amount of the returns.

So the Online Bill presentment would work best with a bill like your utility bill that might vary, but unlikely to be exactly match all the time for an active credit card.

So there is a trade off of wanting to predict the expense in the projected balance vs not having it and having to manually match/correct the transaction/reminder amounts.