Schedule Paycheck shows under Bills, not Income

NWPhotoExplorer

I have setup my paycheck as Income and added some Split Categories to keep track of payroll deductions but it keeps showing up as a bill, not income. I don't understand why this won't stay as income when I picked it from the drop down box. Is anyone else having this same issue?

jacobs

No, I'm not seeing that. Just to be clear, are you describing that you set up a paycheck as a scheduled transaction, and it's showing as a Bill on the Bills & Income page?

Let's try this… Go to the account register, not the Bills & Income page. Do you have the register set to show future scheduled transactions? That is, so you see the gray scheduled transactions in the future? If not, click the little clock icon on the upper right under the Search box, and from the drop down menu select to display scheduled transactions in the Next 30 Days, or Next One Due.

Now you should see your scheduled paycheck transaction(s) in gray in the future. Identify the first of these gray scheduled transactions, and double-click it to open for editing. A blue mini-menu will come up under the transaction. Click “Edit All Instances”.

This will bring you to the Transaction Details screen for the scheduled transaction, which looks something like this:

Make sure the Type is set to Income, and the Amount is a positive number here. If your schedule transaction is set up like this, going to the Bills & Income page, your paycheck will show up on the Income tab, not the Bills tab.

NWPhotoExplorer

Yes, my paycheck is set up as. a scheduled transaction. I double checked mine and it looks like yours. Here are my screenshots. But it keeps changing back to bill and showing up under Bills.

So I am stumped why it doesn't keep the settings and how to fix it. It has been this way for a long time.

jacobs

The issue may be that you have the Amount set to zero. I don't know if your actual paychecks are zero as shown above? If not, try making the scheduled Income Amount any positive number, 1¢ or more.

NWPhotoExplorer

Are you talking about the main window or the splits? No, my check isn’t 0 but I want the transaction to be 0 after taxes and the transfers to my other accounts. I tried setting it to something else but it won’t let me change it. It keeps going back to 0. It’s very frustrating that this program doesn’t work well for being around for many years.

jacobs

The transactions in Quicken should mirror what happens in the real world. If your paycheck isn't zero, you should have a non-zero transaction. If you received pay in a checking account and then moved it to another account, that would best be done with two scheduled transactions, one for the net pay deposit with all its withholding splits, and one for subsequently moving the money elsewhere. That way, you can match and reconcile your Quicken accounts to your real-world bank statements.

You can definitely edit a scheduled transaction. Have you tried editing it the way I described above — via the transaction register and Edit All Instances (rather than the Bills & Income screen)?

jobworker

@Jacob. To jump in this conversation :

I have several incoming checks to my bank account where one of them has a split. They all are scheduled in my checking account transaction register, where the split is set up, and they all appear in Bills & Income at the Income selection. The one transaction, my social security payment, that has the split, shows the net amount being deposited in the bank on the Bills&Income page. The split data does not show on the Bills&Income page. The medicare deduction is set up as a split to category Medical:Medicare Deduction Self on the checking account transaction register.

I had setup the social security income payment just as you described above using the "Edit All Instances" in the checking account transaction register. Everything is as it should be and I thought a simple process to setup.

NWPhotoExplorer

@jacobs Yes, I edited it as you suggested. So my company transfers the money to ADP, so I set up an account for this. Then ADP takes out all the taxes, medical, etc and then pulls out a percentage and puts it in my 401k and ESPP accounts. Then the remaining amount (Net Income) is split and deposited into my checking accounts. I have all this input correctly, as it happens in the real world. So my ADP account should never have a balance as it doesn't contain any money after everything is dispersed.

Looks like @jobworker has the same issue. Seems like a bug in the software.

jacobs

@NWPhotoExplorer I'm not sure why you have/need an account for ADP, which is just a payroll provider. I would enter your net pay in a checking account and record all the splits, including transfers to other accounts, in that non-zero transaction. I think you will find it works successfully.

I live in the transaction registers and don't use the Bills & Income page too often, so I may not run into issues you're seeing. I'm not saying there isn't some quirky issue on the Bills & Income page with zero dollar transactions; I'm only suggesting a way to get around that and avoid the problem.

NWPhotoExplorer

@jacobs I tried this way but I had too many issues with the amounts and reconciliation. I could not keep my account balanced correctly. That is why I changed my setup to a separate account so I could make sure my accounts balanced, I could also keep track of how much in taxes, medical, etc I was being charged.

The Mac version shouldn't suffer because the company doesn't give us all the features that are available to Windows users.

jacobs

The Mac version shouldn't suffer because the company doesn't give us all the features that are available to Windows users.

Throughout the history of Quicken, the Mac version has never had all the features that the Windows version did. And when they had to start Quicken Mac over again from scratch more than a decade ago, it doubled down on Quicken Windows having a big lead in development. On the other hand, Quicken Mac is built on a more robust, modern database and more modern user interface tools, so it doesn't have as many broken features as Quicken Windows. The Mac team is slowly closing the features gap, but since the Quicken Windows team isn't standing still, I don't know if Quicken Mac will ever reach genuine parity with Quicken Windows; hopefully a significant amount of the user-requests features will be implemented over time — but over time is the reality because it's just a small team of developers and the list of requested features is substantial.

That all said, I believe the pragmatic approach is that the issue should be "can I make Quicken Mac work for me" rather than "why doesn't Quicken Mac have every feature Quicken Windows does. And in terms of this forum, that's pretty much all we can hope to accomplish. I don't know if you've taken a crack at Quicken Support, but they would be the best ones to document and escalate any bona fide bug.

I could not keep my account balanced correctly. That is why I changed my setup to a separate account so I could make sure my accounts balanced, I could also keep track of how much in taxes, medical, etc I was being charged.

I will take your word for it that what you tried previously didn't work for you. I'll just say I'm not sure I understand why, since I've had multiple formats of paychecks for me and my wife over the years we've used Quicken, including transfers to 401ks, SEP-IRAs, health plans, etc., and I've always been able to set it up so what I record in Quicken mirrors our real-world accounts and therefore reconcile correctly. And with splits for taxes, medical, etc., you should be able to track all those details without the intermediate ADP account. If you have your pay split between two checking accounts, you should be able to record the net pay into one of the accounts, along with splits for all the payroll deductions and splits for transfers to the other checking account and retirement plans; each account should reconcile correctly, and your expenses should be documented correctly in a report. But without seeing your paycheck details, which I understand you wouldn't want to share in its entirety, it's hard to say what you should try differently to get it to work. Please understand I'm only wanting to help, not to frustrate you further! 😉

NWPhotoExplorer

I haven't tried lately having the initial paycheck go into one of my accounts. Maybe they have fixed that. But after having to start from scratch and reenter all my transactions for the past few years, I am very nervous to try something and break my data again.

I know my 401k and ESPP aren't pulling the data from benefits.ml.com anymore. There were many threads on this topic. So that issue hasn't been fixed.

Thank you for your help. What else do you want to see from the paycheck data?

jacobs

What else do you want to see from the paycheck data?

I suppose what I don't understand is why setting it up as I've described — with a net deposit in one account and splits for withholdings and transfer to other accounts — wouldn't work for you. You just mentioned you can't connect to the financial institution to pull in data from the retirement plan and ESPP account, and I'm wondering how much activity you have in those accounts (other than the paychecks)? If the money from the paycheck is entered automatically with a scheduled transaction, do you actually need to connect to the financial institutions for these accounts? If you handle the accounts manually, you'd have to manually enter any dividend transactions, which might be a lot or not much at all. (I enter my investment accounts manually.)

NWPhotoExplorer

The 401k and ESPP accounts are thru Merrill Lynch. Even on the website I have a tough time seeing how many shares of each stock is bought. Its not a very good or detailed site.

How are you getting reports for all your deductions, etc off your bank account? Maybe I don't have that set up correctly?

As for the deposit going into my account, it varies based on how many hours I have worked, percentage paid, etc. Can you show me exactly how you have it setup. I matched the screenshots you posted before, but things aren't adding up correctly.

jobworker

Just to clear things up: "Looks like @jobworker has the same issue. Seems like a bug in the software."

I don't have a problem, as I said, "Everything is as it should be and I thought a simple process to setup.". I never expected to see the split data to appear anywhere on the B&I page as that deduction went directly to the category selected leaving the net Income to show on the B&I page. All the necessary information is on the checking account transaction register.

jacobs

How are you getting reports for all your deductions, etc off your bank account? Maybe I don't have that set up correctly?

I don't get it from my bank account; I get it from my paycheck detail stub/advice/statement. From the screenshot you posted above, it looked like you were doing the same thing. I manually create a paycheck transaction, with the transaction amount being the net amount I receive, the first split being gross pay, and all the other splits being the various deductions from gross pay. I schedule this transaction to recur every other week. When the bank downloads my transactions, Quicken matches and merges the downloaded pay transaction with my manual scheduled transaction with all the splits.

This is pretty simple for those who have a regular salary which doesn't change from paycheck to paycheck. But when you have a variable salary, then there's more work involved because you need to edit the transaction amount and split amounts based on each paycheck's detail.

This is a mock paycheck entry I created for another post a while back:

It doesn't have all the factors you do, but it does include a transfer to another account, in this case a 401k account — but you could similarly have multiple transfers to other accounts, including a different checking account if you have your net pay split between two accounts.

In your situation, I think I would still create the scheduled transaction; if there's any pay amount you receive which recurs sometimes, use that check as your base. Otherwise, the numbers in the scheduled transaction don't really matter. Each time you get paid, I would look up the paycheck details — I'm guessing you log into ADP to see your gross, net and deductions? In Quicken, mark the next scheduled transaction as paid, then edit it to the correct dollar amounts per your pay info from ADP. Then download from your bank, and the transactions will auto-match.

As for the Merrill Lynch accounts, I have no experience with their website, but I'd pursue their support to see if there's someplace you can see the transaction details in your accounts — it seems like there must be. All the brokerages I've ever seen have a place for recent transactions which show the dollar amount and shares of deposit transactions. The transfer from your checking account paycheck will create a Payment/Deposit transaction in the investment account, increasing cash; then you need to create a Buy transaction to use up the cash for the shares purchased. Hopefully at some point in the future, Quicken Mac will add a requested feature for scheduled investment transactions, so you could set up a recurring purchase of shares, and just adjust the share amount after each paycheck. For now, I'd just click on the last Buy transaction, Duplicate (Command-D), change the date, and edit the amount and shares.

NWPhotoExplorer

I think I will make a test file and see if I can set up something similar so it will drop in checking 1 and then split out to my other checking and brokerage accounts.

As for ML, I know they pull 5% and then split it among various stocks. The stocks change as the "advisor" sees fit so I really have no idea which stocks I am in. I am just enrolled in a "aggressive mutual fund" is what it shows. Unfortunately this what the company I work for uses, so I am at ML's mercy. In Quicken, I can't do a detailed view as ML doesn't support that. I would have to enter everything manually, but as I don't know which stocks are part of this fund, that makes it impossible to track. Anyways, that isn't what I started this thread about.

jacobs

As for ML, I know they pull 5% and then split it among various stocks. The stocks change as the "advisor" sees fit so I really have no idea which stocks I am in. I am just enrolled in a "aggressive mutual fund" is what it shows. Unfortunately this what the company I work for uses, so I am at ML's mercy. 

Wait, so is the investment in a single mutual fund? Of course mutual funds hold lots of individual stocks, as determined by the fund's advisor. But individuals like you and me who hold shares of the mutual fund don't actually own shares of the stocks which make up the fund. If that's what you're looking for or expecting, I don't think any personal finance software does that. There are financial website where you can look up the holdings of a mutual fund to see their top holdings, but you're buying the fund, not the underlying stocks. In Quicken Mac, if you look at asset allocation in the Dashboard or the Portfolio, it can quantify the underlying typers of holdings in mutual funds (e.g. 70% large cap stocks, 20% small cap stocks, 10% international stocks) so you have a general view of all your investment holdings — but not that a particular fund today has 7% Apple stock, 5% Google stock, 4% Nvidea stock, etc.)

For you in Quicken, the split from your paycheck would create cash in your ML Investment account. In that account, you only need to record a single Buy transaction for the mutual fund your investing in. Quicken will track your growing shares of the XYZ mutual fund, and show the current market value of your holdings in the fund.

NWPhotoExplorer

My 401k mutual fund doesn't have letters so I can't look it up.

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