Improve Credit Card Payment Flow for Online Payments

adamberger

After reconciling my credit card statement, I then log into the card website and schedule a payment (ACH debit from my checking account) for the statement due date, which is the same day every month. I then copy the confirmation number back into the payment transaction on that credit card account.

The flow in Quicken is: Reconcile account, choose hand-written check (whatever that is called). Quicken then assumes that the payment is that day, and then switches me to my checking account. I then need to switch back to my credit card account, edit the payment and change the date to the due date, and put in the confirmation number into the Reference or Memo field.

What would be better is, rather than just have the options of printing a check or hand-writing a check, is to have a third option of pay online. Ideally, it would open a browser to the login page for the credit card company, though I'm fine with doing that step myself. But it would default the transaction date to the due date, which it can prompt for, but should default to one month from the last due date, and then stay in that account, so I can put in the confirmation number.

It may not sound like much, but it's 6 credit cards times 12 months times nearly 30 years that I've been using this product. The extra steps add up.

UKR

Are you always paying off the credit card's full balance due?
In that case you can set up, at the credit card's website, automatic debits from your checking account every month on Due Date.
That's a one-time action. Once set up, the credit card company will automatically debit your checking account every month.

In Quicken set up a Scheduled Reminder to begin reminding you about the time you receive the monthly statements. There's no need to set this up as an Online Banking transaction. A local transfer between account registers is all you need.
Set up the reminder to transfer from checking to the credit card register on due date.
Set the "Estimate amount" option to "full credit card balance". Unless you've made new purchases after statement cutoff date, this should have the correct balance amount. Edit as necessary.
Enter the reminder when you receive the new monthly statement, after running a Reconcile

The above saves you a lot of steps and you can never forget to make payment on time.

Chris_QPW

I always hated the "write check after reconcile" dialog. It just wasn't as flexible as it should be.

But as for credit card payments I do the same as @UKR suggested, with the exception that lately I stopped using the reminder and just use a memorized payee instead. I got tired of always having to correct the amount to match to the downloaded one and didn't really need to projected balances to be right. The "Full credit card balance" is never exactly right for two reasons. The first is that it has no concept of when the statement closes. As such, "full credit card balance" keeps going up past that point even though you aren't going to have to pay more than what is in the statement. The second part of it is that if you return anything between the statement ending date and the payment date, how much you owe goes down.

One thing that can be a problem with a memorized payee is that the payee might be the same for different credit cards, but this isn't a problem if all the credit cards are paid from the same checking account. The memorized payee is setup as a transfer from the credit card to the checking account, so the category becomes [Checking Account].