Transfers vs income or payments

RoyO

I am running Quicken Classic for Mac Premier 7.6.1

I download all transactions from my accounts. I noticed that CC payments from banking to a CC show up as income and expense on a cash flow report which I find confusing. It's just money moved from one account to another, there is no "income" or "expense" involved. Is that how it is supposed to work? If so is there a P&L view of your accounts that does not include the "noise" of money moving between accounts?

Jon

Are you setting up those transactions as actual transfers? If the Transfer field is empty then Quicken doesn't realize that it's a transfer & treats them like any other payment or deposit. If you're not manually entering your credit card payments & just downloading the transactions, Quicken isn't going to figure out on it's own that it was a transfer so you'll have to enter that yourself.

Do that & your credit card payments should disappear from the Cash Flow report.

jacobs

To add to what @Jon wrote: what exactly, is in the Category field for your credit card payment transaction?

You have two choices. (1) In your bank account where you made the credit card payment, you can use one of Quicken's generic categories for this purpose, either "Transfer" or "Credit Card Payment". Using either of those tells Quicken that the money went "somewhere", and that it shouldn't be treated as an expense. But it won't affect the credit card account, so you'll have to do the same in the credit card account for the payment received transaction. (2) Create a linked transfer, so that a single transaction for this payment appears simultaneously in both accounts. In the bank account, this would have this exact syntax of "Transfer:[name of credit card account]". (Or you can add the Transfer column to your register, and enter/select the account there.) When you create this linked transfer, it will show up in the other account without any further action.