Auto-Pay and check register

myqf

Quicken Classic Business & Personal latest and greatest version on latest greatest Sonoma.

A number of bills are setup in Bills & Income. 1 or 2 bills each month end up being paid on different days or for different amounts than expected, sometimes different than even Auto-Pay has scheduled by the company taking the payment. Anyways, I end up with the check register showing what happened and what was supposed to happen (so duplicates), the Bills & Income tab showing bill is Overdue by X days. What is the preferred way to handle this situation so that Quicken acknowledges the two transactions are actually one? Screenshot shows my options on the Bills & Income tab.

jacobs

If you have a manually-entered transaction and a downloaded transaction in your register which actually represent the same real-world transaction simply drag one transaction over the other in the Quicken register. It will warn you that the amount will be the amount of the downloaded transaction, which is good since that's what happened in the real world. If the transaction has a single category, that's it, you're done. But if the transaction has two or more splits, be aware that when this merge takes place, Quicken will create an Uncategorized split line for the difference between the downloaded amount and the manual amount, since it doesn't know how to allocate that difference — so you need to open the splits and apply the difference to the appropriate split line or lines.

myqf

Thanks. Cool that worked. I needed to update the category for the final transaction. The planned transaction was dragged onto the what happened downloaded transaction. The planned transaction category was wrong and was kept in the combination process. Quick edit fixed that.

Out of curiosity, how could I have found this information without asking here?

jacobs

Yes, sorry I wasn't complete in my explanation: when you merge a manual and downloaded transaction, all the fields from the manually-entered transaction will survive the merger except the amount. So the category you manually entered will prevail, along with any Memo or Tags. And that's really what you want; it would be problematic if you created a manual transaction and Quicken's often inaccurate auto-categorization overrode what you had manually entered.

As for how to learn about Quicken Mac features, one good place to look is Quicken Help on the Help menu. It's by no means a complete user manual, but there is a lot of useful information in there. I think a lot of Quicken Mac users overlook using the online help.

In this case, I clicked on Quicken Help > Banking/Spending > Downloading Transactions, and the resulting page has lots of useful information, including when and how to match transactions: