Trouble transferring between accounts - not Detected [edit]

Question

Double-entry for transfers between accounts and credit card payments are no longer working correctly.  I have used Quicken for 15 or so years and I have never seen this until 5 or 6 months ago.  When I pay one of my credit cards from my checking account, the transaction in my credit card account should show the credit card as the Payee and the checking account as the Category, but it shows the credit card account as the Payee and the Category.  Likewise, when I am looking in my checking account it shows the credit card as the payee and the checking account as the Category.  Same problem with transfers between my checking and my savings account.  The transactions refer to themselves not to the other account.  I now have to correct all these entries by hand.

Chris_QPW · Answer

Since you have confirmed that you are in fact using the Downloaded Transactions tab and accepting transactions into the register, I suspect the problem you are having has more to do with either memorized payees or existing transaction matching (in the second account), not transfer matching.

I suggest that when you encounter the problem you take screenshots of it so that it is easier to illustrate the problem.

rob · Answer

@Chris_QPW Thanks for your detailed answer, a bit more than I expected.  But what I took away from it is that what I have done all these years and still do is to accept my checking account transactions first before anything else.  Since all my transfers and payments go through my checking, detection has always worked fine.  My last couple of downloads have come out all right too, so I don't understand why it did not work for the months that gave me trouble.  Maybe I did acceptances out of order, I don't remember all I did.  Even so, payments from my checking should not have shown my checking account as the category.  For now, we carry on, watching all that money flowing out of my accounts …..

Chris_QPW · Answer

If you have been using Quicken for 15 years, then I suspect that you aren't using transfer detection, because about the only way anyone would but using it is if they also have automatic transaction entry mode turned on, and old-time users of Quicken Windows almost never turn that on.

First off, I might as well tell you what the "SuperUser recommendation" is and that for all transfers, manually enter them before downloading and then match to that transaction in the register.  "manually entered" can be a reminder.  This is the least problematic way of doing it.

Second, I will state that transfer detection is only a guess based on a downloaded deposit and a withdraw about the same time for the same amount but with different signs of course.  As such "confirm" should always be on.  This will also clue you into if you transfer detection is actually being used or not.

Now on why there is little chance that someone not using automatic transaction entry mode will be using transfer detection.

Let's start with the situation where both accounts with the transfer are downloaded at the same time, and the transaction is in both of them (this is far from given if the accounts usually it hits one before the other).

The thing to understand is that automatic transfer detection doesn't kick in until after the second transaction goes into register.  Actually, you have to complete/close the Downloaded Transactions tab, in the second account before it kicks in.

So, you come to the first account, and you are in the Downloaded transactions tab.  If you are doing this properly then you are going through each transaction and making sure they are correct and then accepting them into the register.  When you click on the transfer you should immediately see if the category is in fact a transfer or not.  If you entered the transaction manually or through a reminder, you would be looking to match that transaction.  The only other way it would be a transfer is if you have a memorized payee that fills that in, but that is unlikely to work right (explained below).  So, if not correct, then a person should/would probably correct it at this point, which will automatically put in a transfer transaction in the other account.

If you are using Accept All then STOP.  It is the worst thing you can do. If you are using automatic transaction entry mode the transactions go into the register, but they are marked with the status of New or New Match, so that they can be "reviewed".  Accept All puts them in the register with no way to tell them apart from existing transactions.

Now you go to the second account's Downloaded transactions tab, by this time when you click on the downloaded transfer transaction it should match the one that is already in the register.  Therefore, you have bypassed transfer detection.

To get transfer detection to kick in while using the Downloaded Transaction tab you have to do this.

In the first account you accept the transaction into the register without any category.  Then you go to the second account, and you repeat this action of entering that side of the transaction with no category, and after you have closed the Downloaded Transactions tab, that is when transfer defection kicks in. This is not only an unlikely flow, but also a very bad one.

On the use of memorized payees for filling in of transfers, the reason I find those problematic is because Quicken's memorized payees are global and as such two "Deposit" payees can match in different accounts, but also it means that you better always download/accept transactions into the register with the memorized payee before downloading the account that might have the other side of the transfer, because it is the entering of that transaction in the first account that sets up the matching of the transaction in the second account.

So, one might wonder when transfer detection will "properly" kick in.  With automatic transaction entry mode on, after the transactions are downloaded, Quicken goes through the process of putting them in the registers in all accounts, when this is finished then transfer detection will be checked and might kick in.  One might think that this is a serious problem with using automatic transaction entry mode, and it could be because of problem with Quicken, that is the reason everyone should always have confirm on.  The problem isn't that you can't detect a wrong transfer detection in this mode, you can easily do it since you should have been reviewing the New and New Match transactions.  The problem comes in that Quicken has no way to back out of wrong transfer detection without losing one side of that transfer transaction that is being changed back to two regular transactions.  This has been a bug from the day they implemented transfer detection.