Showing Category in Budget from transfer payment

moodyjudy

I have a Best Buy credit card set up in my MAC Quicken. I entered the total amount of my purchase in Dec, 2023 and I am making payments each month to pay it off. So I included that payment in my Budget as a category. However, when I make that payment from my checking account each month, I am doing it as a transfer so it shows my current balance in my Best Buy account without making two entries. So I just realized for it to show up in my budget too, I will have to use the " Transfer to {Best Buy}" as a category in my budget or it won't show up. That is awkward as I wanted to keep this payment under all my Household expenses but now it is listed separately in my budget under TO.

This works because that is the only amount I am paying each month to Best Buy Card. But now i am considering a large payment on my Visa card which I am going to spread out into payments over 9 months. But I will continue to have other charges on my Visa that I will pay off each month along with the ongoing payment. I always categorize each charge in the credit card account for my budget and transfer the payment from Checking to balance my card each month. Not sure how I will handle logging payments and still allowing the category to go to the proper budget item unless I show the entire amount up front that I am paying off and not the ongoing payments which will really screw up my budget.

Does Quicken have a fix for something like this?

jacobs

There's no "fix" because nothing is broken. 😉 Quicken is built for, and most people use it, to record their actual income and expenses as they occur. So if you make a large purchase on a credit card, from an accounting standpoint, the expense occurs when you make the charge, not when you pay it off over time.

However, for a household budget, it's the amount you pay each month rather than the charges you incur, which you may want to be monitoring in your budget. You're correct that editing the categories in your budget to include Transfers to/from the appropriate accounts is the way to do this. Yes, it's kind of annoying that this shows up in a Transfers section of the budget, but if you accept that, it gets the credit card payment into your expense budget, and that's the goal.

Of course, as you correctly note, this means you are double-counting expenses in your budget: once when a transaction is recorded in the credit card account, and again when you pay the credit card. Many people don't include the payments (transfer) in their budget for this reason. But if you're more interested in your cash flow, then it makes sense to include the transfers. And then you might want to consider whether you then want to remove the credit card account(s) from your budget. That is, if you want your budget to work on a true cash flow basis, you want to see the monthly payment in your budget and not the charges. It's a personal decision how you want your budget set up and what you want it to track. (Your income and expense reports wouldn't be affected; this is just adjusting what you count in your budget or not.)

Another option you might find useful is to create two budgets: one which tracks the actual expenses (credit card charges) without the transfers, and one which tracks your actual spending (credit card payments) without the credit card charges. It's easy to switch back and forth between budgets, if this would be a helpful way for you to set it up and track things.

There's one more way to handle this, which involves a little more work, but which might address what you're wanting to see. You could create a separate liability account for one or a few large purchases, similar to a loan. When you make the purchase on your credit card, the transaction would be recorded not as an expense but as a transfer to the liability account. Then you'd create a scheduled transaction to expense a portion of the large purchase each month. For instance, in your credit card account, you could create a monthly transaction for $0 which has two splits: a monthly expense (negative value) using the appropriate spending category, and the opposite amount (positive value) as a transfer to the liability account. Such a transaction would create a monthly expense and would reduce your liability account; when the large items are paid off, you'd just stop having the monthly transaction. It's easy to edit the monthly transaction, so when you make a new large purchase and add it to the liability account, you could add a new split line in the $0 monthly transaction to reflect the multiple things you're paying off over time.

I hope one of these approaches might be something you could adopt to make Quicken work the way you want it to for tracking your finances.

jacobs

There's no "fix" because nothing is broken. 😉 Quicken is built for, and most people use it, to record their actual income and expenses as they occur. So if you make a large purchase on a credit card, from an accounting standpoint, the expense occurs when you make the charge, not when you pay it off over time.

However, for a household budget, it's the amount you pay each month rather than the charges you incur, which you may want to be monitoring in your budget. You're correct that editing the categories in your budget to include Transfers to/from the appropriate accounts is the way to do this. Yes, it's kind of annoying that this shows up in a Transfers section of the budget, but if you accept that, it gets the credit card payment into your expense budget, and that's the goal.

Of course, as you correctly note, this means you are double-counting expenses in your budget: once when a transaction is recorded in the credit card account, and again when you pay the credit card. Many people don't include the payments (transfer) in their budget for this reason. But if you're more interested in your cash flow, then it makes sense to include the transfers. And then you might want to consider whether you then want to remove the credit card account(s) from your budget. That is, if you want your budget to work on a true cash flow basis, you want to see the monthly payment in your budget and not the charges. It's a personal decision how you want your budget set up and what you want it to track. (Your income and expense reports wouldn't be affected; this is just adjusting what you count in your budget or not.)

Another option you might find useful is to create two budgets: one which tracks the actual expenses (credit card charges) without the transfers, and one which tracks your actual spending (credit card payments) without the credit card charges. It's easy to switch back and forth between budgets, if this would be a helpful way for you to set it up and track things.

There's one more way to handle this, which involves a little more work, but which might address what you're wanting to see. You could create a separate liability account for one or a few large purchases, similar to a loan. When you make the purchase on your credit card, the transaction would be recorded not as an expense but as a transfer to the liability account. Then you'd create a scheduled transaction to expense a portion of the large purchase each month. For instance, in your credit card account, you could create a monthly transaction for $0 which has two splits: a monthly expense (negative value) using the appropriate spending category, and the opposite amount (positive value) as a transfer to the liability account. Such a transaction would create a monthly expense and would reduce your liability account; when the large items are paid off, you'd just stop having the monthly transaction. It's easy to edit the monthly transaction, so when you make a new large purchase and add it to the liability account, you could add a new split line in the $0 monthly transaction to reflect the multiple things you're paying off over time.

I hope one of these approaches might be something you could adopt to make Quicken work the way you want it to for tracking your finances.

moodyjudy

Thank you for this very thorough answer. I did set up the liability account procedure and I think it will work for the way I do my budget. So I need to set up this $0 payment as an automatic payment each month in my credit card account. Then when I transfer a payment each month from checking to the credit card for the $1500 payment plus maybe $400 in extra charges, it will balance my actual credit card for that month without affecting the automatic payment I have set up. I guess until I actually start making these payment, I won't really see how this works but I think it will.

Thank you