Pending Future Transactions and errors

norcalgirl

I have about 5 bank accounts and several credit cards connected to Quicken. Some are business and some are not. I was looking over what Quicken might consider my main personal account, I guess, and it has all of what I think are future transactions for the credit cards even though I will not be using this account to pay them. I'm sure that is OK but it is a little disruptive to see. The active balance is also off about $40. It has pending transactions that are not coming from this account.

Is this normal? I don't usually use this account for anything because it is just an emergency stash to use with a visa check card if needed so it isn't a big deal.

I see that some of the transactions that haven't happened yet are places where I wanted to mark a payment as paid on the credit card statement as I paid a couple of them early and it accidentally hit it twice on some of them. I might just leave this alone in the future and let the auto-update take care of it. Hopefully it does, or should I remove them from the register?

It is also not reporting my Nordstrom card properly which is at a 0 balance but it says I'm late from November (I'm not, the last payment was in November.)

These might even be RTDM issues. I need to go find some manuals or something I suppose.

I can fix computers, design, program, make and edit videos, write, and create but this accounting stuff gives me nightmares. :) Thanks.

jacobs

I can try to address at least some of the issues in your post…

I was looking over what Quicken might consider my main personal account, I guess, and it has all of what I think are future transactions for the credit cards even though I will not be using this account to pay them.

There is no such thing in Quicken Mac as a "main personal account". Transactions go in whatever account you enter or download them; Quicken has no preference for any account. Nor are accounts specific to personal or business use; although any account can be marked for primary use as business or personal, any account can contain a mix of business and personal transactions. So if you're seeing future transactions in your "main" checking account, it's because you created the scheduled transaction in that account. (Maybe this was before the Business & Personal version became available a couple months ago?) If you know you're going to pay this recurring transaction from another account, click on the next instance of the transaction in the current account and drag it to the account you want. Quicken will ask if you want to move just this one instance or the entire series of scheduled transactions; select the latter, and the scheduled transaction will be move to the account you want it in.

It has pending transactions that are not coming from this account.

That's hard to understand happening. Unless these are future-dated transactions you entered manually, the only place pending transactions are coming from is from the downloads from your financial institution.

The active balance is also off about $40.

Without seeing your data, it's hard to help you with this; you're going to need to figure out what's off. I would start with last month's bank statement, and reconciling Quicken to the statement. If last month's reconciliation is correct, then I'd wait until you get this month's bank statement, and again, reconcile the bank statement to your Quicken transactions. Because different financial institutions download transactions somewhat differently, pending transactions can make reconciling to the Online Balance difficult or impossible. At least until you get things firmly under control, I suggest doing only reconciliations to a bank statement for a couple months, because that eliminates any issue with pending transactions.

It is also not reporting my Nordstrom card properly which is at a 0 balance but it says I'm late from November (I'm not, the last payment was in November.

Again, this seems like a data entry issue rather than a Quicken issue. How is it saying you are late from November? A scheduled transaction which has not been marked as paid? Perhaps you entered, or downloaded, the payment and it didn't get matched to a scheduled transaction? If so, you should be able to drag the actual November payment over the scheduled transaction, and Quicken will merge them — and there won't be an overdue payment showing any longer.

Something like this is easy to spot and fix if you're doing monthly reconciliations to your bank statements and credit card bills.