Splits - how record one payment, but distribute across multiple tags. (Q Mac)

Okeemike

Hi, guys. I'm making a single payment from my bank to my credit card, and would like to record that single payment against multiple tags.

On the bank side, I can enter it as a split, and it will be recorded as a single payment (as you would expect), but on the credit card side, each split is a separate line item. This would make sense if that single payment was being split across different accounts/payees, but in this case, it isn't.

This isn't a big deal, and doesn't happen often, so I can work around it manually. However, if there's a way to to somehow combine those line items on the CC side, that would be super helpful.

Thanks in advance for any recommendations!

Quicken Jared

Okeemike said:

Hi, guys. I'm making a single payment from my bank to my credit card, and would like to record that single payment against multiple tags.

On the bank side, I can enter it as a split, and it will be recorded as a single payment (as you would expect), but on the credit card side, each split is a separate line item. This would make sense if that single payment was being split across different accounts/payees, but in this case, it isn't.

This isn't a big deal, and doesn't happen often, so I can work around it manually. However, if there's a way to to somehow combine those line items on the CC side, that would be super helpful.

Thanks in advance for any recommendations!

Hello @Okeemike,       

I am sorry about any confusion you may have experienced, and I do appreciate the time you took to speak with us about this here on the Quicken Community.

Unfortunately, the proper method for adding tags across a split payment's constituent parts in Quicken Mac is to simply go through the separate line items one by one in the register and then right-clicking or control-clicking each of them and selecting Edit Transaction, then adding tags. It sounds as though you may have already been approaching the  in this manner.

I do want to inform you that features such as this can always be proposed on here at the Quicken Community in the form of Idea threads. These can then be voted on by the userbase and passed along to the development team so that they can consider such additions for implementation. You can always browse the Ideas of others - and offer your own - in the Community Category linked here:

https://community.quicken.com/categories/product-ideas-quicken-for-mac

I hope this is helpful, and I am grateful for any further discussion you may provide about this subject.

Thanks,

Quicken Jared 

jacobs

@Okeemike Can you share a little more about what you are trying to accomplish with multiple tags?

Typically, you would record every credit card transaction in your credit card account, where you can categorize and tag each charge, including splitting charges into multiple split lines with different tags. When you pay the credit card bill, it's typically just a simple transfer of money from the checking account to the credit card account, with no categories or tags. So it would help to understand why you'd want to tag the payment, rather than tagging the actual expenses in the credit card account.

Okeemike

First, thanks for taking the time to see if there's a workaround
Secondly, if there's a better way to do this, I'm all ears!

Let me see if I can describe this, and not be too wordy...

I use tags to track certain purchases. Tags like "Cruise", "Christmas", and "Boston Vacation". This lets me track how much I spent on individual vacations or projects, and if I have to pay it off over a month or two, I can track my progress paying off that trip/purchase/project. (it's really more of a cognitive thing, but if I buy something expensive and can't pay it off immediately, I like to know I'm making progress getting it back to a zero balance).

So assume that I make a $100 payment from the bank to the credit card. I want to apply $25 to Tag 1, $25 to Tag 2, and $50 to Tag 3. If I split the payment on the bank side of the transaction, I see a single line item of $100 (and can drill down into the splits).

On the credit card side, I get three transactions...one for each split. This is where the problem is.

I would like for the credit card side of the transaction to be handled just like the bank side: just one line item, and I can see the splits if I drill down into it.

If I reverse the process, and put the splits on the credit card side the situation just reverses (as you would expect).

My guess is that (obviously) this isn't really how the split function was intended to be used, and it would be easy for me to just process three separate transactions, so this is really more of an aesthetic thing than anything else. I think of it as a single $100 payment, and not three separate ones, and that's how I'd like to process the payment.

For what it's worth, I can't use categories because that's used to link the payment from the bank to the credit card, but even so, I'd be left with the same problem.

Hope this clears things up!

Again, thanks in advance for any recommendations you might have. (this is definitely a first world problem)

jacobs

Thanks for taking time to explain what you're looking for. Now, here's the part I'm still wondering about regarding the tags: aren't you categorizing and tagging the expenses when they are recorded in the credit card account? So at any time, you can run a report for Category=vacations and see what expenses you've incurred, and you can run a report for Category=vacations sorted by tags if you want to group these expenses by vacation or project, right.

So your issue is that when you pay the credit card bill, and you don't pay it in full, in your mind you're paying part of Vacation A, part of Vacation B, and all of Clothing and Grocery purchases? But in terms of your credit card account, you've charged, say, $10,000 and paid back $4,000, so you have a $6,000 balance yet to pay. I guess I'm not seeing how it helps to have some arbitrary breakdown in Quicken of what, in your mind, the $6,000 balance you owe was spent for. You know by category and/or tag report what your spending was, and you know how much money you owe. You could say "I owe $2,000 to pay off Vacation A and $4,000 to pay off Vacation B", but those are arbitrary; it could just as well be that you owe $4,000 to pay off Vacation B, $1,200 for clothing, and $800 for groceries. While I do appreciate that mental games can help with managing finances and budgets, I'm questioning why you'd want to muck up your actual financial record with these arbitrary values. Apologies if I have misunderstood or misconstrued what you're asking for.

To answer your original question: at the current time, there is no way to record splits in a Quicken Mac transfer transaction and control whether the splits are combined into one transaction or are separate transactions in the other account. 

Okeemike

Thanks...that answers my question. This means I can stop trying to figure out to make it happen. 👍

As to WHY I do things this way... There are (primarily) two reasons:

(*) If I were to use categories, I would end up with a TON of them. For example: Vacation:Boston-March-2020, Vacation:Boston-June-2020, Vacation:Cruise:July-2021, etc..

(*) Secondly, when I make a payment to the credit card, the category field is used as a type 'transfer', to replicate that transaction between the two accounts. While I could doubly enter those transactions (and not use the transfer transaction type, keeping them linked reduces the possibility of error by 50%.

NOTE: I also will save for future stuff in this way too. So, for instance, I will have a tag for "Cruise 2023", and throw money into another account. This way it's earmarked for future use.

jacobs

Yup, I wasn't suggesting sub-categories for every trip. Although the list of Tags for every trip can get similarly long over time.

My question was why you were trying to categorize both the expense and the payment. That's not the normal way a business or individual tracks in come and expenses. Normally, you categorize just the expenditure, and when you pay a bill or move money to a savings account, it's simply an uncategorized  transfer of funds between accounts. I think your answer is that you're trying to do a form of "envelope budgeting" whereby you put money into different "buckets" and draw from those buckets. The short answer is that Quicken isn't built to work that way, although people do create approaches of varying complexity to try to emulate such an approach.