transfers/payments?

pamela77

When I transfer money from one account to another or pay a cc bill, quicken puts 1 transaction in each account each showing the words "transfer" or "payment" but it doesn't seem to recognize that it is actually the same transaction. Is there a way to get quicken to recognize that, or do I always have to go in manually and fix it. If so, I change one of them, and delete the other?

Sometimes I find then that quicken thinks that transaction is missing (the one I deleted) and it downloads it again.

jacobs

If you are downloading transactions in both accounts, there's no way Quicken knows from the downloaded transaction data which account in your Quicken file the transfer is to or from. Think about it: if you pay your credit card bill from your checking account, your bank transmits a checking transaction that money was transferred out — but it doesn't know the actual names of your accounts in Quicken to be able to specify where the money went; and the credit card company knows it received a payment, but it doesn't know which of your Quicken accounts it came from. 

There are several strategies to deal with this: 

(1) Leave it alone. You have two separate transactions in the two accounts, each one correctly updating the account. You don't have to link them.

(2) Edit the downloaded transaction in one of the accounts from Category=Transfer to Category=Transfer:[account name], creating a linked transaction in the two accounts. In the other account, delete the downloaded transfer transaction each month.

(3) Manually create a manual transaction which is a transfer between the two accounts, and schedule this as a monthly recurring transaction. 

     a) Make the scheduled transaction have no amount. Each month, mark the recurring transaction as Paid. After you download the transaction in this account each month, drag the downloaded transaction over your manual transaction and Quicken should ask if you want to merge them. The merged transaction will retain the date and amount downloaded, but the category (transfer) of your manual transaction, so you don't have to set that up each month. 

     b) If you look up the transaction amount each month before you download the transaction, in Quicken mark the transaction paid and edit the amount to the actual amount of the transaction. When Quicken subsequently downloads the transaction, it should automatically match the downloaded transaction to your manual transaction. 

Either 3a or 3b handle one side of the transfer; on the other side, you still have to delete the downloaded transaction. I don't do this, so someone with more knowledge will correct me if this is wrong, but I don't think you can match the downloaded transaction in both accounts to the same manual transfer transaction. For one thing, the dates may be off by a day (e.g. the payment out of your checking account is February 3 but the payment in the credit account is February 4), and a linked transfer can't have different dates in the two accounts.

Note that once you download a transaction in Quicken, it will not download the same transaction again. So if you delete a downloaded transaction, it will not come back. (Every transaction is assigned a unique transaction ID by the financial institution — the FITID — and Quicken retains a list of every FITID it has ever downloaded, so if the financial institution download the same transaction again, Quicken will ignore it. 

As I alluded to above, I don't deal with this because I enter my transactions manually most of the time (unlike the majority of Quicken users), so if there are other tricks to making this more efficient, hopefully someone who does this every month will jump in with more or better advice.