Will this work in setting a reminder?

Don Awalt

Hi all,
I was wondering if this will work, to get reliable matching of bills being paid to reminders. Assume I have a credit card bill that gets Auto Paid on the card's web site. I would like a Reminder to remind me that the money is going to come out of my bank account. 

1. When the transaction comes down, the payee is "Automatic Payment - Thank". So I edit the payee, creating a custom Renaming Rule, that when the downloaded payee contains "Automatic Payment Thank" (I clicked to select all 3 words), change it to "1st Credit Card Payment" (for example). I think that will work, yes? Then I can right click on the transaction, and set up a Reminder that triggers off of the revised payee name? I think that will work, won't it?

2. Here's the rub. By coincidence, I have THREE different credit cards whose payment transactions come down to their respective accounts, where all three have a payee name "Automatic Payment - Thank" !!!!  As far as I can see, Custom Renaming Rules are across accounts, not by account, so if I set up a rule that changes "Automatic Payment - Thank" to "1st Credit Card Payment", when the payment transactions come down from the other 2 credit cards, it will incorrectly change them to "1st Credit Card Payment" also, even though they are credit card 2 and 3? If this is true, is there a way around this?

Thanks!

Boatnmaniac

Don Awalt said:

Thanks @Boatnmaniac for the reply! So it sounds like you start with creating an Online bill? I have not done that, as I had trouble in the past. So I now have an online Bill for each Amex card created, and linked to a reminder. Balances and due dates are correct. They even say "auto pay" in italics under the amount!

One question though - since they are auto pay, the transaction comes down 10 days prior. I assume I want to do an "auto enter into register" 10 days in advance? But I don't see the option to do that?

Thanks for your help @Boatnmaniac !!

I do not do Online Bills.  Some people like the Online Bills feature but I am not one of them because like you I have tried it and encountered issues that took some time to get corrected.

What I do is set up manual Bill Reminders. You can set up your Bill Reminders to either remind you to manually enter them into the registers or to automatically enter them into your registers.  To get your preferences for this set up:  

1. Select the Reminder and click on "Edit this instance and all future instances".
2. Click on the triangle immediately to the left of "Optional Settings" to expand it.
3. Click on "Change" on the 1st line below "Optional Settings" which will open a popup where you can select the entry preferences you want.

The important thing to remember is to make sure that the dollar amount of the Reminder matches exactly what is going to be actually paid.  If the dollar amounts do not match exactly, Quicken will not match the downloaded transaction to the Reminder transaction.

Boatnmaniac

If you want the Payee for each credit card to be unique, then skip setting up a Renaming Rule for them...unless you can find a difference in the downloaded Payee names.  Otherwise the Renaming Rule will kick in and the matching process will not work well.  If you can find a difference in downloaded Payee names for each CC you can then set up 3 unique Renaming Rules...one for each CC...and it should work well but personally I don't see a need for the Renaming Rule(s) in this kind of scenario.

I have 4 Citi CCs and the payment transactions for all 4 of them download with exactly the same downloaded Payee name.  I do not have a Renaming Rule set up for any of them. 

What I did was to set up Bill Reminders for them with each one having a unique Payee name...Citi Costco Card, Citi Sears Card, Citi AT&T Card and Citi Rewards+ Card.  Then when I enter the Reminders into the registers I make sure that the amount of the Reminder transaction matches the amount that will actually be paid.  When the payment transactions later download from the bank Quicken almost always matches them perfectly with the Reminder transactions by primarily keying off the transaction amount and to a little lesser degree the transaction date.  I really can't remember but I seem to recall that the 1st time I needed to manually match the transactions but once that was done the Memorized Payees data was then set up and I didn't need to do that, again.

Don Awalt

Thanks @Boatnmaniac for the reply! So it sounds like you start with creating an Online bill? I have not done that, as I had trouble in the past. So I now have an online Bill for each Amex card created, and linked to a reminder. Balances and due dates are correct. They even say "auto pay" in italics under the amount!

One question though - since they are auto pay, the transaction comes down 10 days prior. I assume I want to do an "auto enter into register" 10 days in advance? But I don't see the option to do that?

Thanks for your help @Boatnmaniac !!

UKR

All my credit card payments and many other recurring bills are set up to be auto-paid by the credit card company or the biller and directly withdrawn from the checking account.
Each of these bills is defined in Quicken as a Scheduled Reminder, with "Remind me 21 days in advance of due date".

When I receive notice of a new statement or bill being available, I record the reminder with the correct amount and nudge the due date, if necessary, to match the statement's "will be withdrawn on xx/xx/xx" date.

On or after due date, when I download transactions for my checking account containing one or more of these payments, there's basically nothing I have to do except to verify that Quicken correctly matched the downloaded transaction to the already existing register transaction. No need for a renaming rule. The payee name I used in the scheduled reminder remains unchanged, no matter what payee name was actually downloaded.

The same applies to the credit card account registers. The transfer from checking was already recorded and Quicken will simply match the downloaded transaction to the register transaction.

Boatnmaniac

Don Awalt said:

Thanks @Boatnmaniac for the reply! So it sounds like you start with creating an Online bill? I have not done that, as I had trouble in the past. So I now have an online Bill for each Amex card created, and linked to a reminder. Balances and due dates are correct. They even say "auto pay" in italics under the amount!

One question though - since they are auto pay, the transaction comes down 10 days prior. I assume I want to do an "auto enter into register" 10 days in advance? But I don't see the option to do that?

Thanks for your help @Boatnmaniac !!

I do not do Online Bills.  Some people like the Online Bills feature but I am not one of them because like you I have tried it and encountered issues that took some time to get corrected.

What I do is set up manual Bill Reminders. You can set up your Bill Reminders to either remind you to manually enter them into the registers or to automatically enter them into your registers.  To get your preferences for this set up:  

1. Select the Reminder and click on "Edit this instance and all future instances".
2. Click on the triangle immediately to the left of "Optional Settings" to expand it.
3. Click on "Change" on the 1st line below "Optional Settings" which will open a popup where you can select the entry preferences you want.

The important thing to remember is to make sure that the dollar amount of the Reminder matches exactly what is going to be actually paid.  If the dollar amounts do not match exactly, Quicken will not match the downloaded transaction to the Reminder transaction.

Don Awalt

Ah thanks @UKR you and @Boatnmaniac have been very helpful!

Boatnmaniac

You are very welcome, @Don Awalt .  Let us know if you have any other questions.