Credit Card credit balance

jobworker

I have a Citi credit card whose balance was zero.  Next I went to the Citi card web page and took advantage of my rewards.  I chose to have my rewards awarded to me as a cash credit to my account.
In Quicken (Mac Version 6.7.1 (Build 607.44146.100), I received the download for the reward money credited to my Citi credit card account.
Quicken would not reconcile because Quicken, both Beta and production, took (assumed) the "Online Balance" to be a negative balance (-12.07).  
As a consequence I will have to wait until I have purchased product where my purchases exceed the credit or positive balance.  Screen shot provided.
I have submitted this an an error in processing May18, but do not know whether this is being worked on.

jacobs

@jobworker Try this: switch your reconcile startup to "Use Statement Balance", and enter the balance as -$12.07. Click Next, and then you should be able to complete the reconciliation. I just tried this and it seemed to work as expected. 

jobworker

Yes that worked but is wrong.  I'm just fooling the program. The program is picking up the (online) balance from Citi and misinterpreting it as a negative. 
Quicken should be handling the signs correctly.  Never the less I appreciate your suggestion as a way to reconcile.

jacobs

jobworker said:

Yes that worked but is wrong.  I'm just fooling the program. The program is picking up the (online) balance from Citi and misinterpreting it as a negative. 
Quicken should be handling the signs correctly.  Never the less I appreciate your suggestion as a way to reconcile.

It's pretty much impossible for us as consumers to know whether the fault lies with the way Citi is transmitting that value or with the way Intuit is interpreting the data.

I imagine that since different credit card companies probably transmit their data differently, it's possible that Intuit's code is designed to solve the 99.8% of the time that a credit card balance reflects money owed to the company, not money owed to the customer, and "corrects" what it thinks is a mis-signed value. But it's just as possible that Citi's code in formatting the QFX data to transmit to Intuit uses an absolute value or unsigned value when transmitting an account balance.

A credit balance for a credit card is a pretty rare occurrence for almost everyone. To me, if there's a simple no-extra-work workaround for this rare instance, that's a win, and you can move forward.

But if the principle of the misinterpreted sign of the balance bugs you, you can report it to Quicken and/or to Citi to see if anyone bites and looks into it. If you call Quicken Support and get a representative to screen share with you, and to see and understand the problem, they might write it up to escalate the issue to the Intuit team. And perhaps a few months from now, should you ever run into a similar credit balance, you can see if it's been fixed or not. (Or you could intentionally overpay your bill to insure you have a credit balance, to see what happens! Or you could ignore it, take the easy way out, and carry on…  

jobworker

Thanks for the comprehensive and thoughtful comments.  Of course I can live with it though I must admit I had not thought of how the credit card company transmit the data.