Editing Principal and Interest Entries for Scheduled Loan Payments from Month to Month (Q Mac)

JKHenderson

I use Quicken for Mac on computer without using any down-loaded account transaction. I have my reasons for this, and have been, for the most part, pleased with how Quicken works. However, recently I changed three liability accounts to loan accounts, since they should have been set up as loan accounts initially. I created scheduled transaction for each of the loan accounts using the loan terms. Now, when I process the individual payment using the statement from the financial institution, I am unable to edit the amount of the principal and interest portions of the total payment because those entries are "greyed out". While I understand the logic of not needing to adjust loan payments since the monthly payment remains the same from month to month, I should be able to edit the principal and interest portions of the payments, since they can and do change from what the amortization schedule lists as the payment amounts, based on when payments are made monthly. More often than not I make my loan payments earlier than the due date, which changes what the principal and interest portions will be for the next month's payment. So…either I incorrectly set up the loan accounts, or Quicken does not allow for editing the principal and interest portions of a loan payment within the Scheduled Transactions window. If the latter is the case, I think this would be a very convenient feature to add.

jacobs

If you loans calculate interest on a daily basis, then Quicken will never be able to get the interest/principal split exactly right because it depends on the day each payment is processed. So, yes, manual adjustment is needed.

For some such loans, it may be easier to keep the loan as a liability account rather than a loan. This way, you could have a scheduled monthly transaction which you would just mark paid and then adjust the split each month to match your loan provider's information.

But if you keep it as a loan, you can set up a scheduled monthly transaction each month in your checking account. The transaction amount would be zero every month, and would consist of offsetting splits for interest expense and transfer to the loan account. So if you check your loan provider's data and see that the principal was credited for 50¢ more than Quicken's amortization schedule calculated, you simply have a split to transfer 50¢ to the loan account and -50¢ to interest.

JKHenderson

It's disappointing to me as a customer to be limited to either having to set up the account as a "liability" account rather than a "loan" account. But, as jacobs suggested, I am left with maintaining the account in Quicken as a "liability" account, and editing the scheduled monthly transaction details, which I would have to do regardless, because the principal and interest amounts never agree with what the loan amortization tables reflect. I suspect that Quicken would prefer that users opt in to the process of downloading account transaction details rather than manually entering them. But that process also requires that the Quicken account transactions be stored (backed up?) in their cloud servers, and I'm not comfortable with that. My preference is to manually enter the transactions because I do NOT trust the security of my financial information being stored in Quicken's cloud servers. There's too much risk with regard to the information being hacked into. I understand the need for many users to use the downloading features because of time, convenience, etc…but I have manually entered my transaction detail for the better part of 20 years, starting with Microsoft Money, and then eventually with Quicken when Microsoft discontinued support for Money.