Credit Card Pmnt: Transfer Categorization Not Working Correctly

nopeatnopedotnope

I have a credit card account and a checking account in Quicken. I am categorizing individual purchases on my credit card using the standard Quicken spending categories. When I send a payment from my checking account to my credit card, I can see the matching transactions in the two accounts, and I try to categorize both transactions as a transfer using the square bracketed categories, e.g. [bankaccount] (in credit card account) and [credit card] (in banking account). This is all according to standard Quicken practice, as I understand it.

But when I try to do this, here is what happens. I start in the banking account, select the dropdown in the category field, and select the [credit card] transfer category. The transfer category shows up in the banking register, and it looks fine at first. But when I look at the credit card account, I now have two identical payments: one is the original payment that was downloaded and is still uncategorized; the second is a new transaction that was apparently created when I set up the transfer category, and has the linked transfer category [bankaccount]. The second transaction is also uncleared. This means I have one too many payments, and now my balance is screwed up.

It gets worse. Then I try deleting the new transaction on the credit card side. This now deletes the transaction on the bank account side as well, and now my bank account is missing a transaction. When I try to redownload my transactions, it does not bring back the missing transaction and now my bank account balance is screwed up. When I try to manually enter a new transaction, I get it in and try to link it to the remaining credit card transaction using the above procedure. This once again creates a new transaction instead of recognizing the existing one on the credit card side.

I have no words to express my rage when encountering this problem. Somebody please tell me I'm doing it wrong, and then tell me how to do it right.

I would also like to add that there is an additional frustration I have just discovered -- when looking at this message in the window I just typed, I cannot scroll back up and so cannot see the beginning of my message. Please fix that too.

Rocket J Squirrel

You're doing things mostly right, but in the wrong order.

You ought to enter the transfer before downloading the payment from the credit card account. Then the downloaded transaction in the credit card account will match to the transfer transaction that's already there.

The way you did it, you could have deleted the downloaded, uncategorized CC payment transaction and all would have been well.