Reconcile when Credit card account on line has a positive balance

peteb301

Unsure if this is normal or a problem . Latest versions of Mac Quicken and OS 17. I overpaid credit card account so it now has a $-100 , note the minus sign meaning I have a credit. Quicken shows a positive balance of $100 (White Not red). when attempting to reconcile account , a difference of $200 in red shows. Looks like Quicken does not recognize the credit card method for showing a postive number (my speculation). Or , I did something incorrectly.

Jon

That sounds normal to me. Credit card balances in Quicken are normally red because you owe the bank money, so if you overpaid your card the balance should be white to indicate the opposite. but credit card statements are typically th other way around - a positive balance on the statement is money you owe the bank and a negative balance means they owe you.

jacobs

In Quicken, the signs are reversed from what you see on a credit card statement. On a statement, your charges are positive numbers; in Quicken they're negative. On a statement, your payments/credit are negative; in Quicken they are positive.

This makes sense. For the credit card company's standpoint, charges increase your balance, so they're positive numbers leading to a bigger positive amount owed. They don't want to show your balance as a negative number; too many people would be confused by that.

But from a Quicken perspective, where there are assets and liabilities, money in the bank (an asset) has to be shown as a positive number, and credit card charges (a liability) has to be a negative number. So if you have an abnormal credit balance in your credit card account, it's money owed to you (an asset), and Quicken correctly shows it as a positive number.

But Quicken can get confusing when you use the reconciliation screen. Here, Quicken adapts to what users will see on their bank or credit card statements, so the signs are reversed. That is, if you owe your credit card company $100, it will show a balance in the Quicken register of –$100, but your credit card statement says your balance is $100. So on the Quicken reconciliation start screen, you enter your balance reported by the credit card company: $100, a positive number. This is not confusing most of the time. But when you have a credit balance, you need to enter your balance on the reconcile screen as –$100. (There was a time when Quicken wouldn't let you enter a negative number here, but they fixed that.) Fortunately, Quicken keeps the debits and credits straight, so your reconciliation will work if you enter the ending balance of –$100. I suspect you got a $200 discrepancy because you entered the statement balance as $100 instead of –$100.

Make sense?

peteb301

It all makes sense -MANY THANKS for the in-depth explanation, and I did use the reconciliation initial screen to make the change as you suggested and it balanced perfectly.

Amazing that that initial screen comes up every time that a reconcile is called for and I have not used it until now.