Bill pay option for "Balance As Of"
This suggestion is for recurring manual bills. I pay most of my expenses by credit card, then pay the statement balance every month on my due date (racking up those points!). Since I have almost all my regular expenses mapped out as recurring bills, I get a clear picture of my cash flow, any issues with balances, etc.
For the planned credit card payments, I manually average these planned expenses and set the planned payments to this average. Then as each payment gets closer, I manually adjust the next payment based on the current actual statement balance. This is a lot of work, but this information is so important & useful to me, that I take the time to do it- sometimes daily.
But this is something Quicken could easily do for me. Here's a concrete example.
I have a credit card that has a payment due on the 11th of every month. I have this set to pay automatically through my bank. The statement balance is the balance on the 14th of the previous month.
So rather than entering a fixed amount for this bill, I would like to specify that it take the amount from the balance on the 14th of the prior month. I realize it may be tricky how to make this user experience work with all the other options, but I know Quicken product managers are geniuses. They can do it!
This wouldn't be 100% correct every time, but it would be close enough for planning and a tremendous time saver for the way I use quicken every single day.
Comments
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So, if you know on or after the 14th of this month that $xxx.xx will be due to pay off your credit card bill by the 11th of next month, instead of doing all the calculations, simply record the scheduled reminder early, with $xxx.xx as the amount paid on the 11th.
I've been recording my credit card payments when I receive the new statement and dated them to the due date. This gives me a future dated register transaction, both in my checking and my credit card accounts, thus allowing me to plan for future balances in both accounts.
Having the credit cards set to Autopay, to be automatically debited on Due Date, for the full balance due, and having done so for many years, I've never missed a payment … yet …0 -
I do that … but it make managing my cash flow easier if quicken did it for me =). Actually, to be clear, I don't do the calculations all the time. I've set up recurring bills for all my regular expenses (I do it as manual bills, I don't have Quicken paying for me). I also have set up recurring payments. But some bills are monthly, some are bi-monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc. Some are even estimates (I have a recurring entry for my estimated food expenses for example). So the question is how to estimate this payment? The way I do it is download a years worth of future transactions, remove the payments, sum them up, and divide by 12. This is what I put in for the monthly payment and over the course of the year it is accurate. But it's not accurate for each individual month. This is why, rather than putting in a fixed amount for the planned future payments - Quicken could just get the balance dynamically, from the register on the specified statement date. This way, even as I have changes in expenses and unplanned expenses, it would update accordingly. This would be easier and more accurate for my cash management.
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