Proper way to use 'Update Balance' on asset accounts?

Question

For several asset accounts I track - e.g., house, car - every now and then I want to update the current value of the account, due to depreciation or appreciation. Right now I'm using the seemingly handy 'Update Balance' feature for this...all good.

Except whenever I update the balance, Quicken enters a transaction with a "Balance Adjustment" payee and no category. This has the effect of creating thousands of dollars in 'uncategorized transactions' inside my ledger, which I generally want to avoid.

My 'fix' is currently to manually assign a 'self-transfer' category to each transaction. So for instance, if the asset account I'm updating is 'House', the category I enter is [House], and I OK the warning about transferring back into the same account.

Is that how this is supposed to work? Is it a bug that Quicken leaves these balance adjustment transactions uncategorized by default?

DGHartman · Answer

I have been using Quicken since 1991 and my database goes all the way back the whole 30 years. I have always updated Quicken to the latest versions over the years and have found many errors in the software. Overall, I like the way it works and it tends to get better over time.

One of my frustrations is the way Quicken does the "Update Balance" on different accounts. If the account is a banking account, then the "Update Balance" feature allows you to enter a category for the transaction. This is good and makes sense. If the account is a Property & Debt Account, the "Add Category" pull down does not appear. In the latter instance, Quicken will either enter no category at all or enters "Misc" depending on the individual account. Both of these are not useful.

I would much prefer that Quicken add a pull down for the Property & Debt accounts to select a default memorized transaction that will always be used to "Update Balance" for that particular account using the update dollar amount. Note that you just can't recall an existing memorized transaction to make this entry since the new balance dollar amount will be recorded simply as an addition or subtraction from the existing account total. By doing it this way you would need to manually calculate the "Update Balance" entry amount yourself, defeating the whole purpose of the "Update Balance" feature.

Quicken, are you listening?? Please fix!!

KnnNike · Answer

So if I'm understanding you correctly, you use the same technique I'm using except the category used is "_UnrlzdGain", correct?

KnnNike · Answer

@Chris_QPW I have the most up-to-date version of Quicken Premier, and it doesn't generate this 'Misc' category for me...weird.

And I cannot use the Zillow feature. I have a condo, and there's a well-documented bug that the Zillow/Zestimate/value update doesn't work if your street address contains more than one property (think 123 Main Street #40). That's a whole other headache I'm waiting for a fix on.