What do the Account names mean?

Gotom

I don't understand the difference between the various Accounts in the Register's top left col. in Check Resister view:

1. All Transactions
2. Banking
3. Cash
4. (My bank account no.)
5. (Name of my bank) followed by XO### - added in call to Quicken Support
6. Credit Card
7. Name of my credit card account
8. Co

Please clarify the difference. Thank you, Tom

Jon

"All Transactions" is just that - a register showing all transactions in all accounts. It's mainly useful for searching - if there's a transaction you're looking for but you don't remember which account it's in, you can find it in All Transactions & figure out from there which account it's in.

"Banking" , "Cash" and "Credit Card" are similar to All Transactions but restricted to accounts of that type. "Credit Cards" is all your credit card accounts, "Cash" is for Cash accounts. "Banking" is all bank accounts including cash and credit cards as well as checking & savings. I don't use those much, they're mostly useful for keeping the individual accounts grouped together and organized.

Individual account names don't mean anything, you can call them whatever you want.

I'm a little surprised that your bank accounts are listed under Cash, I would have expected them to be under either Checking or Savings.

jacobs

The left sidebar is your way of navigating between your various accounts in Quicken. It's a hierarchical list (in an order pre-defined by Quicken and not editable by users). When you click on something in the left sidebar, Quicken displays on the rigth side a register of the account or account group you've clicked on. So if you have two credit card accounts, ABC Visa and XYZ Mastercard, clicking on ABC Visa will show the transaction register for that credit card account. If you click on the group heading, Credit Cards, the register view will show all transactions in both credit card accounts. If you go higher up the tree and click on Banking, the register view will show credit card and checking account transactions. If you go to the top of the tree and click on All Transactions, you'll see transactions from every account you have. The left sidebar always remains visible so you can jump from one account to another at any time. So let's go down that tree from the top:

All Transactions: Just what it says; it's a register view of all transactions in all the accounts you have in Quicken. It can be useful if you have multiple credit/debit card accounts and want to search for a transaction but don't remember which account it's in. When you use Search in All Transactions view, it will also search through any accounts you may have marked closed and hidden.

Under All transactions are four main groups of accounts: Banking, Investing, Property & Debt, and Hidden Accounts. (There can also be Separate accounts, which show up under the Net Worth total at the bottom of the sidebar.) Note that you will only see the headings for accounts you have in Quicken. So if you don't have any loans or asset accounts, you won't see the Property & Debt heading. If you don't have any brokerage or retirement accounts, you won't see the Investing heading. From a separate thread, it sounded like you have only two accounts in Quicken currently: a checking account and a credit card account — so you would only see the Banking heading and not the others.

Banking: The subset of all your transactions which includes all banking-type accounts, which inludes checking accounts, savings accounts, money market accounts (which are stand-alone and not part of a brokerage account), petty cash accounts, and credit card accounts.

Note that these main account groups (Banking, Investing, etc.) have a little icon to the left of the group name, either "v" (for expanded) or ">" (for collapsed). Clicking on the icon toggles between the two views.

Cash: One of the three sub-groups within Banking, the Cash group consists of checking accounts and cash accounts.

What's interesting to note here is that you don't see the "v" or ">" icons to the left of Cash — but they're actually there and just not displayed! In my opinion, this is one of the worst design decisions the developers made; they apparently felt that showing "v" and ">" next to every account group and sub-group was too cluttered, so they hid them for all but the top level groups. And that ends up confusing tons of users, especially if one of their sub-groups gets collapsed and they can't see it any more. But once you know the trick, it's not a problem: place your cursor over the sub-group name, like Cash, and you'll see the line highlight in gray, and the "v" icon will be visible. Click it, and you'll see everything under Cash "disappear", or collapse up under the Cash heading. Hover over Cash again, note the ">" icon, click it, and the Cash group will expand again.

Cash Accounts: Under the Cash sub-group heading, you'll find whatever cash accounts you have. Typically, this is one or more checking accounts and for some people, petty cash accounts (if you want to track the cash in your wallet and your spending of that cash).

In your case, you report seeing "(My bank account no.)" and "(Name of my bank) followed by XO###". Since you have only one checking account, it sounds like in your call with Quicken Support, they had you do something which created a second instance of your bank account. You will have to examine each of them to see if they are complete duplicates, completely different (e.g. one account has older transactions and one has recent transactions), or a mix of some different and some duplicate transactions. Your goal will be to combine these into only one surviving checking account in Quicken. Is the second one, created in your call with Quicken Support, the one that is set up to download transactions? The one that has downloaded your most recent transactions? Then this is the one you'll want to keep.

Going back and forth between the two accounts, determine if some or all of the transactions in the first account are unique and belong in the account you're going to keep. It's easy to move transactions from one account to the other: you click on a transaction so it becomes highlighted, and drag it to the destination account in the left sidebar — and the transaction will move to the destination account. Multiple transactions to move? No problem! you can select (highlight) multiple transactions and then do a single drag to the destination account in the left sidebar. Multi-transaction selection is similar to many other Mac programs: (a) Command-click on individual transactions will add each transaction to the selected ones; (b) clicking one transaction and then Shift-clicking another transaction will select all the transactions between the two.

Once you have all the proper transactions in one of the checking accounts, rename it to something friendly, like "Union Checking"; to do this, Control-click on the account name in the sidebar, and select Rename from the small pop-up menu you'll see. And once you're sure the other account is empty or contains only duplicate transactions you no longer need, delete that account: Control-click on the account name in the sidebar, and select Delete from the pop-up menu.

Credit Card: This is another sub-group, at the same level of the hierarchy as Cash above it. For users who have multiple credit card accounts, clicking the group heading will display all transactions in all the credit card accounts together. Since you apparently have one credit card account, there's no difference between clicking on Credit Card and the actual credit card account. (Except one: when you want to reconcile an account, you must click on the account name in the sidebar, not the account group or sub-group; you can only reconcile if you've selected a single account. Which makes sense: if you had two credit cards and clicked on the Credit Card group heading, you shouldn't be able to click on Reconcile, because you can't reconcile transactions from two accounts simultaneously.)

Credit Card Accounts: Just like under the Cash heading, here you'll find the one or more credit card accounts you have. You can rename the account as explained above, by Control-clicking on the account name in the sidebar, and select Rename from the pop-up menu.

I have no idea what the "Co" is at the end of your list. Is it under Credit Cards or a different heading? If you click it, is the transaction register empty? Perhaps you did something to start creating and account along the way and stopped. If it's empty, delete the account. If it's not empty, determine what the transactions are and whether they need to be moved to your credit card account or whether they are duplicates that can be deleted.

In the end, with your two accounts, you should end up with a hierarchy which looks like this:

All Transactions

      Banking

            Cash

                  Union Checking

            Credit Cards

                  ABC Credit Card

If you have investment accounts that you later add into Quicken, they will fill out more of your sidebar below the Banking group.

I hope that all makes sense. Take your time working through everything. Experiment moving a transaction from one account to another and then moving it back. Collapse and expand the account groups and sub-groups. (If you're concerned about messing up, do File > Save a Backup before you proceed.)

I wrote this all out to try to help you get up to speed, but a lot of this — and much more — information can be found within Quicken Help. In Quicken, pull down the Help menu to the first option, Quicken Help. This opens a browser window at the top level of help for Quicken Mac. Take some time to work your way down the links on the right side. It's not a full-fledged old-style user manual, but there's actually a ton of information here, and going through the sections relevant to you will help you get oriented to Quicken Mac.

Gotom

Wow - I need to digest all this . . .

Thank you both.

Tom

jacobs

@Jon I'm a little surprised that your bank accounts are listed under Cash, I would have expected them to be under either Checking or Savings.

There is no "Checking" sub-group under Banking; checking accounts appear under the "Cash" sub-group. I've never understood why checking accounts are lumped under "Cash" but savings accounts get their own "Savings" sub-group — but that's the way it's been since the modern Quicken Mac began.

Gotom

(Name of my bank) followed by XO###

I'm guessing this is my Debit card account. Should I cleanse it of other Transactions?

Thank you, Tom

jacobs

@Gotom As I've said above, a debit card is not typically a separate account. A debit card allows you to charge expenses to your checking account. When you look at your checking account statement, on paper or on your bank's website, do you have a single checking account? Do the transactions in that account represent checks and deposits as well as charges made with your debit card? If so, then you should have a single account in Quicken which exactly mirrors your real-world acocunt at the bank.