No Loan Transaction Register!!!!

jrbrett

This is an appalling change from the way things used to work. I have a new HELOC set up with BofA, and there is NO LOAN REGISTER. There is some kind of loan balance screen. Worse, Xfers to/from my checking don't reconcile/match. They DOUBLE COUNT and I have no way to edit them! Please, please tell me how to fix this. I looked everywhere but don't see where I can turn on the Txn register without disabling the connection to BofA. I need to see withdrawals and payments from/to. Standard stuff! It shows as "Home Equity Loan" in the account screen. Help!!!

Tom Young

By design, any loan that's set up for "downloading" has no register you can access. The conceit is that the lender will always be right, always sending you the correct information, so you have no need to get your grubby hands on a register. Unfortunately things do go awry, one way or the other, and you can't step into the register to fix things. The only way to get the register back is to unhook that Account from downloading.

Downloading loans have a very weird process associated with them (from an accountant's standpoint) and I'm guessing that's the source of the double counting you're seeing. The accounting for principal payments or principal borrowings is very simple. When you make a principal payment the entry is:

Debit (decrease) Loan Account $XXX
Credit (decrease) Checking Account $XXX

and withdrawals are the same entries, reversed: the Loan Account gets increase and the Checking Account gets increased. But with downloading loans it doesn't work this way. In the case of a principal payment Quicken, makes a "one sided" entry (the "push" from the lender) in the Loan Account, decreasing your liability. Since there is on "other side" to the entry that you can see, your Net Worth goes UP! To offset this erroneous situation, when Quicken makes the Checking Account entry for the payment, the principal isn't applied to the loan - that's already been done - it's applied to an expense Category (it's not an expense, to an accountant) and that fictitious "expense" makes your Net Worth go DOWN. The end result is that your "expenses" are overstated and your Net Worth is correct.

A HELOC doesn't work well at all with this weird accounting since it doesn't amortize like a mortgage and you can increase the loan balance with your withdrawals. If functions much more like a credit card in that respect.

jrbrett

Well, before now, I had a HELOC that just worked with Txn's like any other account, was connected to my bank, and all the accounting worked perfectly fine. This seems like a recent(ish) change in the way Quicken works. It is really, really a bad design, and the old way of doing it wasn't wrong or broken in any way. This is going to be way too painful to use. It keeps trying to get an initial amount in the loan setup, and an interest rate. Well, day one, zero, but it won't accept that! And the rate is going to vary. Like in all the years designing and using Quicken, and in their own experience this is how a HELOC works??? Agreed, it should just link in like a credit card account. But I can't "fix" it, because BofA automatically created the link with the very unspiffy new Web Connect, and I have no control over any of this. Really po'd! Also, I can write checks directly from the account. How am I supposed to book those with the correct spending category?

QWinUser

@jrbrett - how did you set up the account? As a Heloc, or as a Loan? If you go into account details, what account type does it show? From what I understand, a Heloc should be set up as a credit card. That is how mine was set up when I had one. There is a Heloc account set up, but it is an offline account.

UKR

The following is a workaround … until the powers to be at Quicken manage to get HELOC accounts to work like (online or offline) credit card accounts with an available transaction register.

To get out from under all these problems, my recommendation is to run the HELOC account as an offline Credit Card account.
This way you'll have a register, but you need to maintain it manually.
Record the monthly interest charge as shown in the statement. Record the monthly payment as proper transfer from Checking to HELOC. And, yes, manually record the check you wrote in the HELOC register.