Can't use posted dates and other columns

simplycorbett

On my (offline) accounts I can't use the posted date column or reference/statement memo/statement amount.

My bank sorts its transactions by posted date. How on earth am I supposed to record keep with my bank if I can't add a posted date?

The date column is for when the payment is made, not the posted date. Your support was not very helpful with this.

simplycorbett

Are we not allowed to have offline accounts on quicken? I don't want to link my bank accounts online :)

I had tried previously but it was missing transactions and manually sorting through and adding the missing transactions was more work then just logging the transactions by hand.

jacobs

I'm in the minority of Quicken Mac users who, like you, enter all my transactions manually. As you have found, the Posted Date is a field used only for downloaded transactions. For manual entry, very few users would want to enter two dates for every transaction. Further, at the time of entering a transaction you likely don't know the posting date, so it would entail entering a transaction, logging onto your bank's site a few days later to look up the posting date, and then modifying each transaction in Quicken to enter the posted date. I'm happy entering my transactions manually but I would never want to do all that additional work — work for little to no gain, in my opinion.

Your original questions was "How on earth am I supposed to record keep with my bank if I can't add a posted date?" My question to you is: why does recording the posted date matter? Some banks and credit card statements show a posted date, but many do not. I've kept the books for a mid-size company, and the posted date was never part of the transactions records there, either.

The posted date mainly affects reconciliations, since the transaction date and posting date may span two different statement periods. But this isn't a problem in doing a reconciliation, and in fact, is the reason we reconcile between a bank statement and a checkbook or Quicken record of transactions. In the reconciliation, you check off the transactions in Quicken which match the transactions on your bank/credit card statement. It doesn't matter if the transactions are in slightly different orders; unless you have thousands of transactions each month, it's generally quite easy to locate and check the appropriate transactions in Quicken. The key in doing a reconciliation properly is that you follow the bank statement in the order it is printed, checking each transaction off in Quicken as you go. If you have a transaction in Quicken before the statement end date which the bank didn't post until after the statement end date, then that transaction doesn't get checked during the reconciliation; it will show up in the next month's reconciliation, both in Quicken and on the bank's statement.

Jon

If the bank is listing transactions in posted order, either online or on a printed statement, then I can see how it would be useful to duplicate that sorting order in Quicken, especially when reconciling. Personally I don't want to do the extra work of maintaining a second set of dates, but I can understand someone else deciding it's worth it.

jacobs

@Jon @simplycorbett Some of my credit card statements list transactions in Posted date order, and some in Transaction date order. In the case of Chase credit cards, it's a hybrid: while transactions listed online are in transaction date order, on the monthly statement they are listed in posting order but the displayed date is the transaction date — so the list of transactions has dates out of order!

Now, I think that's a goofy way to present transactions in a customer statement, but it's an example of a major financial institution going its own way. Different banks and credit card companies choose to display their results differently. In any case, I have to log onto my account on the credit card company's website and individually click on each transaction if I want to see both the transaction date and posting date. I would certainly not want to do that to manually enter each transaction's posting date into Quicken.

And whatever they choose to do, it may be different that what I've recorded in Quicken. For example, if I order something today from Amazon, I might print that receipt and record that purchase dated today, but Amazon might not charge my credit card for two days, and it might take another day to post to my credit card account.

My argument is that these date differences just don't matter to me. When I reconcile my transactions in Quicken, I go down the transactions on the bank/credit card company's statement, in whatever order they may be in, and check off the corresponding transaction in Quicken until I've checked off every item on the financial institution's statement.

A more extreme example of transactions out of date order is when credit card companies like CapitalOne and Amex show separate lists for my transactions and my wife's transactions. Quicken, of course, has them commingled. Again, it doesn't matter: I go down the credit card statement and check off the transactions in Quicken, which in this case requires two passes from top to bottom for my transactions and then my wife's transactions. In the end, all the transactions are marked as cleared except any which haven't posted by the statement closing date; those remain unchecked, and will come up n the reconciliation list the following month.

In the case of a checking account with a check which takes time to clear, it's the same thing even though the time between the transaction (check) date and posting (cleared) date may be much longer. In Quicken, I record the date I wrote the check. It might clear the bank the same day, the next day, or three weeks later, depending when the recipient deposits it. But when I reconcile my account, I'm simply checking off the checks which appear on the bank statement, and any which haven't cleared stay unchecked until the following month; the actual posting date at the bank isn't important to me.