Paying Credit Cards or Transfering to other Accounts

Qknoob

When the downloaded transaction is a payment to credit card or a transfer to another transaction, the automatic category is on brackets from the same account. For instance, I'm paying Credit Card 1 with Checkings Acct, the category on the Checkings Account will appear [Checkings Acct], rather than the account is paying or transfering money to. When I try to change the category to match the Credit Card or Checkings/Savings account being trasnfered to, it says "You are recording a transfer back into the same account. Save it anyway?". When I click Yes, it would duplicate the transaction. Noy sure how to correct it. Sometimes, just sometimes, it would ask if the transaction is the same as another one exinsting on the receiving account, and that would reconicle. The majority of times, thought, this doesn't happen. Any help?

Quicken_Tyka

Hello @Qknoob

Thank you for taking the time to visit the Community to report this issue although, I apologize that you have not received a response.

Are you able to capture a screenshot showing this error occur from the checking account or a screenshot of the transfer transaction to help see if I can locate the cause of this behavior?

The more information you can provide regarding this issue will help the Community to better understand and assist.

Thank you,

-Quicken Tyka 

UKR

To correctly record a credit card payment or other transfer transaction in Quicken you need to select the destination account name, surrounded by [square brackets], as the Category.

For example, to pay your credit card from your checking account, create a transaction in your checking account with Category = [Credit Card 1]. This will create a matching pair of transfer transactions, one in Checking, one in Credit Card 1.
Here's what paying my AmEx credit card looks like in my Checking account:

For best results manually enter transfer transactions into your register BEFORE you download transactions from the bank which contain the transfer confirmations. For recurring transfers use scheduled reminders and enter them a day or two before the due date. Be sure to use distinct Payee Names for each transfer / credit card payment to avoid confusing Quicken - memorized payee entries.
That takes the guesswork out of the transaction downloading process. Because a correctly entered transfer transaction already exists in your account registers, the process should just match the downloaded transfer transaction to the existing one in both accounts.

If you have issues with duplicate, incorrectly categorized transfer transactions appearing in your accounts, delete the incorrect transactions and keep only the correct one.

Ps56k2

Here's another look at the two Registers for the payment..... Checking account and  Visa Card account

This is the Visa account... showing the transfer coming from [Checking...]

This is the Checking account ... showing the payment/transfer going into the [Visa...] account

jonlyons

Has there been a resolution to this issue? I'm a long-time Quicken user and have been recording transfers for years. I just started seeing this new problem a few months ago.

When I download transactions from my accounts, transfers show up auto-categorized as transfers, but with the same account in brackets. When I try to change it to the proper source or destination account, I get prompted that "You are recording a transfer back into the same account. Save it anyway?".

This happens now with multiple accounts and is a recent change in behavior from Quicken.

I'm using Quicken Deluxe 27.1.33.24 on Windows 10.

Thanks!

UKR

jonlyons said:

Has there been a resolution to this issue? I'm a long-time Quicken user and have been recording transfers for years. I just started seeing this new problem a few months ago.

When I download transactions from my accounts, transfers show up auto-categorized as transfers, but with the same account in brackets. When I try to change it to the proper source or destination account, I get prompted that "You are recording a transfer back into the same account. Save it anyway?".

This happens now with multiple accounts and is a recent change in behavior from Quicken.

I'm using Quicken Deluxe 27.1.33.24 on Windows 10.

Thanks!

To avoid problems with transfer transactions not properly created from downloaded transaction data, I recommend you follow my advice above and manually record all transfer transactions prior to downloading.

jonlyons

> @UKR said:
> To avoid problems with transfer transactions not properly created from downloaded transaction data, I recommend you follow my advice above and manually record all transfer transactions prior to downloading.

I'm a long-time Quicken user with these same accounts. I've never needed to manually record my transfer transactions prior to downloading before. Did something change recently to make this more difficult? It seems like I'm not the only one seeing recent problems here and feels like a bug.

Chris_QPW

@jonlyons Let's take a look at what Quicken has to work with.

Here is a payment to my credit card (what Quicken sees), which enter as a transfer from my checking account.

<STMTTRN>

<TRNTYPE>CREDIT

<DTPOSTED>20210613120000[0:GMT]

<TRNAMT>990.40

<FITID>GEN20210613AUTOMATIC_PAYME00000

<NAME>AUTOMATIC PAYMENT - THANK

</STMTTRN>

The important thing to notice is that it is a "Deposit".  Nothing more. There isn't any information whatsoever about it being a transfer or what account that transfer would be from.  And if I looked up the transaction in my checking account I would see a withdraw for -990.40, but no indication that this is a transfer or what account it is going to.

So how would Quicken "magically" connect the two transactions?

There is basically three possible ways.

The first is "matching"  as in when the transaction is downloaded and imported into the register Quicken can match to a transaction in the register.  That could be a manually entered transaction or one entered by a reminder.

The second one is Quicken can "guess".

After you download the transactions Quicken can see if there are two transactions in different accounts one as a deposit and one as a withdraw for the same amount and around the same day.  This is only a guess if the amounts are quite distinct it is usually a pretty good guess, but if there are a lot of transactions with the same amount then the guess and be quite wrong.

The last method would be that one matches a memorized payee.
Let's imagine using the payment information above, I have a memorized payee for "Automatic Payment", and it has the category of [Checking Account].

I download the credit card and there is a payment there, and it gets matched with the memorized payee, and the category is set to [Checking Account].  That also means I now have a transaction in the "Checking Account" for the same amount, but as a withdraw.

Now a day or two later I download the payment in the checking account and it matches the transaction in the register.

I should note that unlike my description above the "transfer detection guess" is the "last resort", so if one of the other two methods apply the transfer detection guess won't be tried.

Chris_QPW

@jonlyons
P.S. as far as I know they have not changed this flow in years.

BTW in my case I use scheduled reminders mostly because I want them for doing cash flow for my checking account with the project balances, and paying the credit cards are one of the major thing I need to track.  So I already have to put them in, so I might as well use the method that matches to them

jonlyons

It's definitely different from how it's worked in the past. I've always seen the two matching transactions show up in the two accounts (unlinked by default). I would then mark one of them as a transfer and Quicken would identify the pair (or in cases where it couldn't auto-identify, it would just add a new transaction to the other account and I'd need to delete the one from the bank).

Now the transaction shows up as a transfer by default, but a transfer into the same local account (weird). When I try to change it to be a transfer into the proper other account, it says "You are recording a transfer back into the same account. Save it anyway?".

I'm noticing now that I see this even with transactions that aren't transfers. I had an auto-imported withdrawl from an account (Let's call it "checking" auto-categorized as "[checking]" (a transfer back into itself). I then changed it to be a normal category and got the same "You are recording a transfer back into the same account. Save it anyway?" Super weird and feels like a new bug.

Does anyone from the Quicken product team monitor this forum or do I need to contact support?

lbuckmaster

Hello. I am having the same issue with transfers recording. When I update my accounts through Web Express, it downloads some transfers and categorizes them under Fees and Charges or shows them as uncategorized. How do I change the category without throwing off my balances? When I choose a transfer category to reflect the correct bank account it is transferring to, it gives me the message you are transferring back to the same account. Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

UKR

lbuckmaster said:

Hello. I am having the same issue with transfers recording. When I update my accounts through Web Express, it downloads some transfers and categorizes them under Fees and Charges or shows them as uncategorized. How do I change the category without throwing off my balances? When I choose a transfer category to reflect the correct bank account it is transferring to, it gives me the message you are transferring back to the same account. Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

I repeat the advice I gave earlier in this discussion:
To avoid problems with transfer transactions not properly created from downloaded transaction data, I recommend you follow my advice above and manually record all transfer transactions prior to downloading.
This will give you good transactions in both accounts and Quicken will be able to match the downloaded transfer transactions to the ones already existing in your register.

Ragnar

This has been happening to me as well for about the same amount of time, since about last April. It's annoying and it used to work so something changed for sure. I don't need unhelpful advice about manually entering the transfers first, if I wanted to manually manage my transactions I'd used Excel and save myself a yearly fee.

I don't have a solution yet, just wanted to add that it's not an isolated issue.