Credit Card Reconciliations

mt6099

Sorry, new to budgeting and to Quicken. We make various purchases on our personal credit cards and then my wife pays them off before the end of each month. How do I reconcile these in Quicken so it shows the category of each purchase for budgeting and also the credit card payment without creating a conflict in my total balances?

Beijing Mac

when you enter the transactions into your CC account in Quicken via either manual entry or download, you can assign each transaction a single or multiple (via split) categories which are categories per your budget.  Quicken has default categories for typical transactions a household makes or you can customize these.  You can match the manual entries to downloaded entries or accept downloaded entries.  These will have a "C" in the Clr column.  Then at anytime you have the option to "reconcile" this account to either current online balance or your Statement Balance.  Accepting or completing the Reconcile will change all "C" to "R" (from Cleared to Reconciled).  None of above should create a conflict in your balance as they are routine activities.

volvogirl

How are you entering the purchases now?  Did you set up a credit card account?

The proper way is to set up a credit card ACCOUNT and enter the charges into it when the purchase is made and assigning it to a category. The transactions need to be entered with the date you charged it, not the date you pay the credit card bill.

Then when you pay the bill you TRANSFER the payment from your checking account to the credit card account. Then when you download the payment from the bank you match it to the one you already entered.  Then your credit card account should match what you actually owe at any time.

When you enter the payment in your checking account you put the credit card account name in for the category using square brackets around the name to indicate it is a transfer...like this… [credit card] or newer versions have a Transfer column.

bmciance

Hi, welcome to Quicken!

When you make a purchase on the credit card you make (or download) an entry in the credit card account.  That entry would include the category (or categories) for that purchase.  Additional purchases during the month would happen the same way. Then, when you pay that credit card bill the entry is simply a transfer from your checking account to the credit card (the credit card account would be the "category" for the payment in your checking account).  When you do it this way the purchases on the credit cards would be reflected in your budget.  The payment made for these purchases does not show in your budget as it is simply a transfer of money from one account to another.

Hopefully I made this clear.  Please reply back if you have any questions.