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is my credit card register set up wrong?

Dbaker450

Tech support is telling me that the transfers I am making each month should be in a column titled Deposit. I don't have that column. They are headed Payment. I think this is the reason my balance is never correct. I have Charge and Payment and no Deposit. I would like to resolve this but I can't seem to find a way to add a column for payment. I think I have default columns.
will I have to download all my transactions again :'( ?

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Frankx

Hi again @Dbaker450

Okay, thanks for the additional information.

So, to avoid confusion, I would first suggest that you eliminate displaying the "Amount" column because it is not needed and can only confuse things in this type of account. To fix this take the following steps:

1) Open the credit card register > click on the "Gear" icon in the upper right > select "Register Columns";
2) In the pop-up window - remove the check mark next to "Amount" by clicking on the "check mark";
3) Click on the "done" button.

Now to the real problem. If you are seeing the "Balance" column in black figures- that means that the account is overpaid (the credit card company owes you money), if it is a red number - that means that you owe money to the credit card issuer. The Balance column should increase (red number in the Balance column) when you use the credit card and it should decrease when you make a payment, or return an item purchased for a credit to the account. The "normal" behavior is that the Balance column should be displayed in red figures most of the time.

It is likely that somewhere in the past, there may have been duplicate payment transactions that were posted to (or downloaded into) this account. You should look at past history to try to find these duplicates and delete them. If that doesn't seem to be the case, then the cause would likely be that you have not either entered, or downloaded, all the credit card "spending transactions" (all of the transactions where you purchased goods or services) that have occurred since you first started tracking this account in Quicken. My suggestion for the best way to find out where things started to go awry, would be to go to the first posting in the account and page down until you see the "Balance" column amount turn from Red to Black and then review the transactions from that date forward to try and find duplicates, or unusual transactions, that have caused the "black figures" in the balance column.

Get back to me if you need additional information or have questions. And also let me know how this goes.

Frankx

All comments

Frankx

Hi @Dbaker450

Not sure if Tech Support knew you wanted information on your "credit card" account, or they were just plain wrong, but there is no "Deposit" column for Quicken credit card accounts. You have the correct columns - Charge, Payment and Balance.

When you talk about "transfers" do you mean the payments that you make to pay the monthly bills? If so, those should be in the "Payment" column. Pretty much all other routine transactions - the "charges" you make when you use the card for purchases, including cash back transactions - should appear in the "Charge" column. As far as your "balance is never correct" - I suspect that this could be a timing issue, or perhaps charges or payments that are missing from the account. The way to fix that is to do an account reconciliation. When was the last time that you reconciled the account?

Frankx

Dbaker450

Hello Frankx,

Yes, when I refer to "transfers" i mean the payment I am instructing my bank to send to the credit card company. The columns I see for this account are Charge which shows the amount of the item charged to the account, Payment which shows the payments when the card company receives it, next Amount which again shows the amount of the item (this time in red with a minus sign) and lastly Balance a number in black which is shown to be going up by the amount of the charge. reconciling is very problematic as all my payments for two years are shown as not cleared leaving me with about 28k in payment to work around. Lately all I can do is check if the amount of online balance agrees with whatever i think it should be.
I used to reconcile regularly. In October I accidentally deleted this account. so I set it up all over again. I think I did something wrong at that time as that is when all this difficulty began.

Thanks
Donna

Frankx

volvogirl

If you started over you might have the wrong beginning balance. Maybe the beginning balance was the wrong way? Are you sure the black balance column is going up when you enter a charge?

If the balance is in Black, it means you have a credit on the card. Like if you overpaid the bill or got a refund for something you returned. When you enter a charge it will reduce (decrease) the credit you have available on it. And a payment will increase the balance.

Dbaker450

Thank you for your clear explanation, volvogirl. I think when i started over the system set the balance at zero. What I eventually did was enter a negative number to offset the huge balance that was showing in black. then I changed all the deposits to reconciled status. Now when i run a reconcile I see figures that make sense. all is well. thank you for your help.
PS The transactions for 2021 are incomplete in my Quicken but fortunately I have kept an electronic copy of the statements. going forward I should be ok.

Dbaker450

Thank you Frankx for the very helpful insights. I have gotten rid of the column headed Amount. I think that the credit card account was started back at zero when I redownloaded the account with Citibank. So I changed the status of the Deposits to Reconciled. This helped shift the numbers to red in the balance column. Now I am seeing the individual purchases effecting a decrease in the balance as if they were deposits. thinking now they should be negative numbers....Help again!
I did this duplication of the credit card download in October of 2021. I see now that a transaction was brought in with the words Opening Balance and in the Charge column positive 1339.90 and the entry of -1748.37 in the balance column. the reason I bring this to your attention is that when I run a reconcile on this account I am seeing a difference of -1762.28. Does this seem relevant?

Ps56k2

Dbaker450 said: I have gotten rid of the column headed Amount.

just to clarify - if you Edit the Account - does it show Account Type --> Credit ?

As mentioned, the Account should always show a RED negative balance.... this would be normal for any Credit account.
And for every additional Charge - the Balance goes more negative.... more you owe the CC company.
Here is an example - the $824.64 is a "payment" from our checking account - actually a Quicken [transfer]
and the $11.82 is a refund..

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031128/uploads/editor/mh/nqaemlyx61ed.jpg

Dbaker450

hi PS 56, Yes it is called a Credit account. I follow your explanation. Thanks. it looks from your picture like each new charge is displayed as a black or positive number. as each new charge comes in the red number is growing larger and thus more negative. all that seems clear now.
my problem is in balancing. it seems like all payments of 2021 were not Reconciled. so I changed their status to R. Now I suspect an entry dated 10/18/21 which states Opening Balance -1748.37. this number is similar to the amount that is not balancing. entry is reconciled. I am tempted to delete it. Not doing anything more today as head is now filled with cotton....