Best Practices Help - Apple Cash

Steve_Calif

I'm thoroughly confused on the best practice for managing and tracking Apple Cash and my Apple Card.

Apple Cash

Apple Cash operates like a separate bank account with deposits, withdrawals, and a balance. Separately, I also have an "Apple Card" which is a MasterCard with a credit card number but it is not part of Apple Cash.

My Apple Cash is connected to my main bank account. If I send money to a relative via Apple Cash, Apple first uses the balance in the Apple Cash account and then draws any additional amount from my linked bank checking account. If I am sending $100 and there is a $25 balance in Apple Cash, it will first draw down the $25 in the Apple Cash balance, then tap the bank for the other $75. When I sync Quicken, my bank account will show the $75 transaction. But I do not see the full $100 transaction anywhere.

Quicken shows the account as my bank and the bank name appears as the payee. I manually change that to the name of the person I sent the money to.

In Quicken, the Statement Payee and Quicken Name both show "MONEY TRANSFER AUTHORIZED ON [DATE] APPLE CASH SENT MO 1INFINITELOOP CA SXXXXXXXXXXXX CARD ABCD"

What's the best practice? Should I set up a separate cash account for Apple Cash and then do manual transfers in and out of that account? That seems like a lot of work and a lot of complexity, but I think this may lend itself to better managing the Apple Cash account.

What do people do with Apple Cash?

Apple Card

I created a credit card account for my Apple Card transactions. I downloaded the QFX files from Apple and uploaded them to Quicken. Now I have a separate Apple Card account that shows my purchases, my installment payments, "ACH DEPOSIT INTERNET TRANSFER FR" from my bank.

The purchases and installment payments already show up in my bank checking account. Am I improving things by creating the separate Apple Card MasterCard account? Or adding useless complexity?

I'm also not clear on how to handle the purchases and installment payments and avoid duplication in the bank checking account and the Apple Card account.

HELP!

I'm confused. I want to minimize work, but not miss anything. Conceptualizing this is a bit of a chore. I don't want to get to diminishing returns where a lot more work tracking cash flows and expenditures yields little improvement in cash management. But I want complete and accurate records.

jacobs

The Apple Card is just a regular credit card, so yes, you should have it set up as a credit card in Quicken. All your purchase transactions get recorded in the credit card account. Then when you pay your credit card bill each month, it would typically be recorded as a linked transfer transaction: a payment in your checking account where the Category="Transfer:[credit card account name]" which shows up in both the checking account and the credit card account. However, if you download transactions from each account separately, and each account contains its side of the payment, you can just leave them as two separate Category="Transfer" or Category="Credit Card Payment" transactions in each account. I prefer the single linked transfer, because then the flow of funds is crystal clear — but sometimes it can be annoying to get the downloaded transactions matched properly to the linked transfer in one account or the other. (Part of the issue there is that in Quicken, the linked transfer will have the same date on both ends, but in the real world your payment from the checking account is typically one or two days before the payment shows up in the credit card account.)

The Apple Cash account is a different matter. It's more like PayPal, in that it can pull money from your bank account. I don't have an Apple Cash account, so hopefully some people who do will jump in and post here. I'll just offer a few thoughts in the meantime…

You can definitely set it up as a separate account in Quicken, as a Cash account. I don't know how much activity there is in the account, and whether entering the transactions manually would be too much of a pain or not. (I enter all my transactions manually, so manual entry doesn't scare me off!)

There are a few ways you could record that $100 purchase, and none is perfect. It's currently downloading as a $75 transaction in your checking account, and you can't change the amount of a downloaded transaction. What you could do is edit the transaction and create two split lines: $100, with the appropriate category and memo about what this was for, and –$25, categorized as a linked transfer from the Apple Cash account. So the checking account transaction would remain $75, but you would correctly record the $100 expense, and your Apple Cash account would be decreased by $25. The only problem could be that while you'd see the $100 expense in a report, if you're skimming your register, there's no $100 transaction visible. The other way you could do this would be to record a $100 payment from your checking account, and a separate $25 transfer from the Apple Cash account to the checking account. This way, you'd see the $100 payment to the payee, and your balances would be correct. The only problems doing it this way are that (a) when the $75 transaction downloads from your bank into the checking account in Quicken, you need to delete it, and (b) when you reconcile your checking account, your bank statement will show the $75 withdrawal, and you would need to know to check off both the $100 payment and the $25 deposit in your Quicken reconcile window. That's easy if this happens once or twice a month, but could get confusing if you have a lot of these types of transactions.