Accounts

acha

I imported my Bank Checking Account and say one Amex Credit Card

My Bank Checking Account has deposits (income) and expenses like Utilities, Insurance etc i.e. anything I write a check for. It also has a payment towards Amex which is one large number for the month.

So now to know my income vs expenses I want to run the report on only my "Bank Checking Account" and exclude anything in Amex download (as Amex is paid by my bacnk). Until I added Amex as a link it was easy as the report showed only the Bank which had all income and expenses.

So how do I run a report on a single account as listed in the left pane under accounts.

volvogirl

You really need to include both accounts. Or you will be missing all the categories your charges are for. Are you entering the credit card charges the right way?

To enter credit card....

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.

splasher

You can customize any report (gear icon upper right corner of report) to choose which accounts should be included in the report.

Working with the setup described by volvogirl will get you your expenses by category, but you need to make the payment from checking to Amex to be a Quicken transfer and they cancel out each other so that you only see the unique expenses of both accounts.

acha

Thanks volvogirl and splasher.

1. I went to reports, banking summary and using the gear exlcuded the Amex Card which was sucked into accounts. And yes, I got what I wanted in that it shows all income and all expenses including VisaCard (which was not downloaded into accounts), Auto Payments, Pharmacy etc. And this is new, it shows the Amex Card payments as a transfer. However, before I included the Amex Card in accounts, the payments to Amex would show up just like a payment to VisaCard above which was a sub category of CreditCard. Not critical but is it possible to go back to the report before the Amex was added.
2. The problem I have is that my Amex has 200 line items every month, some of them are random names not recognized and some are ofcourse easy like restaurant. This is too hard to do, especially as the Amex is paid from 3 different sources and I only need to know (for now) how much was paid in 2022 to Amex from Bank without thinking about whether it was a amazon payment or a gas payment. Its not a good way to do a budget but too complicated unless I get help locally from someone who will set it up for me and I only need to maintain it.