Question about credit card account, payment and cash flow report

sserven

I just recently started using a credit card account in quicken to download my transactions to quicken. It's working great and I no longer have to manually enter all the transactions.

I've run into a problem though. I run a cash flow report each month of certain categories for my business. I use that report to enter numbers in an excel spreadsheet. In the past when I manually entered all the credit card transactions they all showed up as occurring on the date that the check to my credit card company cleared my checking account. Now that I have the downloaded transaction in that credit card account, when I run the cash flow report they are showing up in the month they actually happened instead of the month when I wrote the check to pay the credit card balance. This is a problem when I run my monthly cash flow report and I have all these expenses that weren't actually paid for until the following month when the check cleared.

Is there a way to change when these transactions show up in my cash flow report? Do I need to go in and change the date of each transaction to the date when the check cleared to get them to show up in the correct month on my cash flow report? I've always considered the credit card transactions as an expense when the check cleared the bank and not when they actually happened.

Thanks for any help

Sherlock

I suggest you enter the payment transaction as a transfer from the payment account register to the credit card account register using the date of the payment.  The imported payment transactions should match the entered transaction maintaining the date.  We use a bill reminder to enter our credit card payments.

sserven

That is how we do it now with a transfer from the checking account to the credit card account. I'm guessing the only way to solve what I want to do is to change all the individual transactions in the credit card account to the same date as when the credit card payment clears the checking account. Then they will all show up as an expense on that date and show up in the correct month on my reports instead of them being scattered out across different months when the individual transactions occurred.

volvogirl

Your cash flow is when you made the payment, not the individual expenses.  You don't need the expenses to show up on the reports, just the payment date.  Otherwise you will have too much showing going out.

 You need to report the expenses on the date you charged it for your tax return.  Especially for the end of the year.  Suppose you buy something at the end of December so it is a December expense but you don't pay the bill until January.  It still needs to go on the prior year tax return.  And for several other reasons.  

Jim_Harman

Do you need to retain all the Categories for the credit card charges in your report, or just the total payment?

If it is the latter, you could exclude the credit card account from the report. Then on the report's Advanced tab, you would pick Exclude internal under Transfers and on the Categories tab you would select you would select the credit card account in [brackets] to include the transfer in the report on the date of the transfer.

If you need to retain the Categories, you may be able to manipulate the dates of the credit card transactions in Excel.