Why do car payments that I have made for the last year not show up when I run a report?

JustsomeguyintheUS

Quicken for Mac: v6.11.3

In 2022 I made 12 car payments and 1 car payment in January 2023. When I look at my budget for 2023, the Jan 2023 Car Payment does not show up in the Auto & Transport: Car Payment category. When I run a report for the last 12 months, the only transactions that show up are the transactions for 02/11/2022. I expect 12 transactions to show up.

When I look at the bank account, all the loan payments for the car are associated with the Car Payment category.

Any thoughts as to why the budgeting or reporting feature is not working as expected?

UKR

What type of report do you use on the Quicken for Mac?

From reading this Community's messages I understand that there are two types of reports available: some old-style reports carried over from prior versions and some new style reports. The old reports are said to have issues with displaying correct data and usually the advice is to use the new reports.

A Quicken Mac expert user can tell you more ...

jacobs

Could you post a screen shot of one of your loan payment transactions in your bank account? 

Typically when paying a loan, each payment is split between Interest expense and a Transfer to the loan (liability) account for the principal portion of the payment. Although the whole payment feels like an expense, in accounting the transfer between your checking account and the loan account is not an expense because it's reducing an asset (your bank account) and a liability (your loan balance). To show this part of your loan payment in the budget, you need to edit the budget categories and add the Transfer to the loan account. Your loan payments will show in the budget under Interest expense and Transfer to loan, not together in one place -- but it gets the job done. Seeing your transaction might shed light on whether it's entered in a way which would interfere with accurate reporting. 

JustsomeguyintheUS

I started using the software in 12/2022 so I assume "new" reports. When I ask the report generator to show me transactions for the "Auto & Transport: Car Payment" category (I changed the name from Auto Payment to Car Payment), nothing shows up. Come to find out that because I have the transactions set up as a transfer from my checking account to my Car Loan account that the transactions will not show up (because they cancel each other out). This is very frustrating because I didn't ask to show my balances, I ask for transactions for this category and thus it should show me these; even the transfers. When you go into the advanced tab and select show transfers, you now get ALL transfers from ALL categories and All accounts (not just the Car Payment transactions. I cannot say that the reports are very helpful.

JustsomeguyintheUS

@jacobs At the request of the online support team member, I undid my configuration; still doesn't really work. Here is how I had things set up.

In my checking account the transaction for the Car Payment was categorized as "Auto & Transport: Car Payment". I then selected my BoA car loan account in the transfer column, transferring $900.01. This is the amount I want budgeted each month.

In the BoA car loan account, the transfer shows up and I add a separate entry for the interest on the account. This all worked well and all the accounts balanced.

The support team member had me remove all the "transfers" from the transfer columns as this was canceling each of the transactions out and thus not showing up in the budget.

I still have quite a bit of manual work to do to get the budget to work. I will probably not renew my subscription when it come due in a couple of months and find something that does better budgeting work.

Let me know if you have additional thought, thank you.

jacobs

@JustsomeguyintheUS Okay, there are a few things wrong here... but you can get it to work!

First, even if you can get the program to do it, never create a transaction which has both a Category and a Transfer. This violates the rules of accounting, and Quicken intends to eliminate it at some point (it's complicated to remove, and they haven't done it for years.) More important to you, if you create a transaction with both a category and a transfer, it probably won't work correctly in budgets and reports.

As I wrote above, the way to record a loan payment is a split. Let me set up a dummy loan and walk you through it. Here's my loan set-up screen for a $10,000 loan over 5 years at 5% interest:


Note on the right side, Quicken is calculating the amount of principal and interest for the next payment. Now on the next screen, I specify that I want the payments to come from my checking account and I want to to see the split transactions, by selecting Detailed Reminder:


So here's what the first transaction created by that loan looks like in my checking account register — a split between interest expense and a transfer to pay down the loan:



Subsequent months will automatically have the split amounts adjusted by Quicken's loan calculation. So the second payment's splits are slightly different:



If you have trouble setting your loan terms up in Quicken to match exactly what the bank/finance company is doing, you can skip the loan setup I did above, and just create a manual liability account. Then you'd create a scheduled transaction in your check register similar to the above, with the split between interest expense and transfer to the loan account, but you'd have to edit the split amounts manually from whatever information your loan provider gives you (or an amortization report you can create on any number of online loan calculator websites). 

Once you have a split transaction for your loan payments, how do you get them to show up in reports and your budget? This is what I spoke about in my first post above. Click on your budget, click Edit Budget, click Select Categories, scroll down to the T's to find Transfers Out > TO Auto Loan



(My example has an asterisk in front of "Auto Loan"; disregard that; I just named the loan account with the asterisk in so I could make it the first account for this screenshot; you would find your account name alphabetically in the list of accounts under Transfers Out.)

By checking this transfer, it will now be included in your budget. As I wrote above, you have to live with the fact that you won't see your total loan payment in your budget on one line; it will show up as the Loan Interest expense line and the Transfers To:Auto Loan line. Your total budget amount will thus be correct.

For reports, there's a similar but slightly different approach. When you Customize or Edit the set-up of a report, click on the Accounts tab and select Selected Accounts. Remove the checkbox next to the Auto Loan account. Then click on the Advanced tab, and select "Include only transfers with accounts outside of report:


What did those two set-up tweaks do? Since a transfer has money out of one account and into another, in an income and expense report, the transfer out and transfer in would cancel each other out. So by de-selecting the loan account, and then telling the report to include only transfers to accounts outside the scope of the report, the report will include transfers to the loan account because it is not included in the report. (And it won't include the transfer coming into the loan account, because that account is not part of the report.) As with the budget, this results in you seeing your Loan Interest expense on one line and your Transfer To:Auto Loan on another line, but your total outflow of cash will be correct. 

I know this probably sounds complicated! But once you get things set up and you see how these things work, you don't have to continue to muck around with it — and everything from your account balances to your budget to your reports will be correct.