Exclude a payment from a report

acha

I have a bank account BOFA from which I pay all e-bills and checks. I also pay two credit cards, Amex and CitiBank. When I run a Banking Summary report, both Amex and CitiBank show up under Category Credit Card. This is what I want, income and total expenses.

I then added the Amex account to Quicken but did not add the CitiCard. I want my report the same as above. So in Customize, I exclude the Amex account and only select the BOFA account.

Now, under Customize, Advanced, I select Exclude self-transfers. The report now shows Amex as a Transfer to Amex in a separate line at the bottom of the report. I want it to appear under Category Credit Card right next to where Citibank shows up.

What setting should I use? There appears to be no combination where the Amex expense will come next to the CitiBank expense. I do not need to track the details of my Amex (or CitiBank), just the total I paid to these credit cards.

Tom Young

If you click "Reports" > "Banking Summary Report" you get what is essentially an "Income and Expense by Category" report that uses only Account Types of Checking, Savings, and Credit. The report has an Income section, an Expenses section, and a Transfers section. So I'm confused by your statement "both Amex and CitiBank show up under Category Credit Card." Unless you have created a "Category" (Quicken jargon for income and expenses) called "Credit Card" I don't understand what you're referring to here.

Have you created a "Credit Card" Category in Quicken and, presumably, don't enter any credit card charges, but simply expense the monthly payment as a form of expense? That does appear to be the case by your statement "I then added the Amex account to Quicken but did not add the CitiCard", and I'm reading that as you've added the AMEX card, but not the CitiCard as an "Account" (Quicken jargon for a balance sheet item) to your Quicken file, an Account that didn't previously exist in the file?

"Now, under Customize, Advanced, I select Exclude self-transfers. The report now shows Amex as a Transfer to Amex in a separate line at the bottom of the report. I want it to appear under Category Credit Card right next to where Citibank shows up."

Right out of the box the Banking Summary Report excludes self-transfers, so maybe that report you're referring to in your first sentence has some customization you've not disclosed? I'm a bit lost.

IF all the credit cards are in your Quicken file AND you do enter and code all credit card charges THEN you really can't use a Category of "Payments to Credit Card Companies." You payment really goes to lower the balance in the credit card Accounts and you can't use that payment twice, once as a Transfer and then again as a Category.

If you want to show the payments as a form of "expense" you can do that using a customized Income an Expense by Category report. Start by selecting all the regular Banking Accounts. Then modify that report:

It seems like you should be able to do this in your Banking Summary Report but for some reason it didn't seem to work.