Credit card payments show as “Personal Income”

Jillartstudio

Why are credit card payments showing as “Personal Income” rather than as credits or labeled as “credit card payments”?Payments are made directly through credit card websites (like Amex), from bank accounts.I find it a challenge to categorize actual payments as income since no actual income has been deposited back into a bank.  It’s a credit on the credit card account.

Thanks

Quicken for Mac Business/Personal. Version 7.10.0

volvogirl

Is the payment showing up as a Transfer from the checking account? Should be a linked transfer. The checking account should be entered in the Transfer column in the credit card register.

jacobs

@Jillartstudio Let's take a step back to leanr more about how you are entering your credit card transaciotns in Quicken. Do you have a separate account in the left sidebar for the (each) credit card account, and do you download or enter the credit card transactions in that account (those accounts)? That's the way Quicken is designed to be used and works best, but not everyone does that. So we need to know if you have one or more credit card accounts where the credit card transactions are recorded.

If you do, then the answer from @volvogirl above is correct: the payment of a credit card bill in your checking account should be entered as a transfer to the credit card account. The transfer of money out of the checking account will show up as a transfer of money into the credit card account; that's why it's called a linked transfer, since there is only one transaction which shows up simultaneously in both accounts. There should be no category for income or expense on a transfer transaction. You can either make the Transfer column visible and enter the account there, or you can enter the transfer account in the Category field using this syntax (including the brackets):
Transfer:[credit card account name]

It's also possible to record the payment as two separate, unlinked transactions: a payment in the checking account, and a separate payment in the credit card account. You might be doing this because you get these payment transactions downloaded from both your bank and your credit card company. In this case, you have two options. You can delete the payment transaction in the credit card account and edit the payment in the checking account to be a linked transfer as described above. Or you can leave the two unlinked payment transactions in place, and edit the Category to be "Transfer:Credit Card Payment". The category Transfer is special in Quicken Mac because it is (properly) not counted as income or expense; it just means money went somewhere or money came in from somewhere.

Jillartstudio

To both @volvogirl and @jacobs , I will try the transfer process (seems counter to my way of reconcling but hey, what do I know ;))

To directly answer @jacobs,

Yes, I do you have a separate account for each CC in the left nav-bar.

And CC accounts are refreshed /downloaded via Quicken. 

Interesting on how CC show paid. I can activate the Transfer column. One would think, from the bank account a 'payment’ is made and once received on the CC end during the Quicken refresh, the record would show as a credit. But I will give the transfer process a try.  Thank you both for your time.

jacobs

The tricky thing with downloading credit card payments into Quicken is that you're downloading from two different financial institutions (the checking account bank and the credit card provider), who will often post their end of the payment on different days. as I said, you can leave these as unlinked transactions in their respective accounts; just make sure to use the special "Transfer" category so it isn't counted as income or expense.

Many people like to manually enter the payment (as a linked transfer) in their checking register. When the bank account downloads new transactions, Quicken should match the downloaded payment to the manual transaction you entered; when the credit card account downloads the payment, Quicken should match the downloaded payment to the manual transaction. (If it doesn't auto-match, you can drag the downloaded transaction over the manual one or vice versa, to match them.) You can even make this monthly transaction a scheduled transaction, so you'll see it upcoming in your register; then you just mark it as paid and enter/update the correct amount for the current month.

Jillartstudio

@jacobs
Thank you! I completed the recommendation on the transfer process.

For example: CreditCardABC charge of $10.00 and I used the transfer category of [Bank Account 123].

And on the bank account side, the Category became [CreditCardABC].
It seems everything is reconciling correctly and reflecting the credit card payments as expected.

However, if you don’t mind, I’d like to stay on this topic a bit longer. After closing and reopening Quicken, I’m now seeing duplicate payments in the credit card register. In the first attached image, the first row displays my transfer, but the second row appears to be a duplicate. Could you help me understand what might be causing this? Currently, I'm just deleting the unedited duplicate with no impact to the bank acct. register.

I'm also noticing an issue with credit card credits for returned items. For example, two Amazon purchases were returned, but they're showing up as "personal income." How should these be handled?

volvogirl

I don't know about your first problem but for the returned items they should be categorized back to the same category as the purchase. Like Misc or Clothing, etc. How are you entering the original Amazon purchases?

jacobs

@Jillartstudio What you can do is drag one transaction onto the other, and Quicken will merge them. This will keep the Payee, Memo, Category, Tag info you create in the manual transaction but retain the date and amount from the downloaded transaction. It doesn't matter which one you drag onto the other. What matters is the status icons you see: one is the orange pencil meaning it's a manual transaction, and the other is a blue dot, meaning it's a downloaded transaction. Once you drag one onto the other and Quicken merges them, the status icon will be a blue pencil. (Should you accidentally merge the wrong two transactions you can reverse the merge by Control-clicking on the transactions and selecting "Unmatch Transaction" from the pop-up menu.)

Alternatively, can delete the unneeded downloaded transaction and just retain your manual one, which is the linked transfer. But it can sometimes be helpful if you've retained the downloaded transaction, which has a few additional fields of information, typically hidden, which you can see when you select the transaction and do View > Show Inspector. Also, if you are in the habit of matching transactions, you'll be alerted if the downloaded amount and manual amount differ, where you might miss that if you're in the habit of deleting the downloaded transactions.

For the Amazon returns, you should do as @volvogirl suggested, and categorize them with the same expense category as you used for the original purchase. so if this was clothing, your return should be reducing your clothing expense.

If the majority of your Amazon purchases use a specific category, you may want to create a QuickFill rule for that Payee to use the category you desire. Of course, you can change it for any transactions which should have a different category, but at least that would give you a default expense category for Amazon instead of it defaulting to Personal Income. Another thin you may want to do is create a Renaming Rule to standardize your Amazon transactions to use a Payee name of simply "Amazon" instead of "Amazon Marketplace blah blah blah". In Window > Payees & Rules > Renaming Rules, you'd create a rule to say "If Statement Payee contains 'Amazon', set the Payee name to be 'Amazon'". This way you won't have multiple different Payees for "Amazon", Amazon Marketplace", etc., and you can have one QuickFill rule for this Payee for the default category of your choosing.

Jillartstudio

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20460878#Comment_20460878

Thanks @volvogirl, My Amex transactions are automatically imported when I refresh, so I don’t manually categorize them. However, I check the categories monthly to ensure Amex categorized them correctly, and I occasionally make edits if needed.
Regarding the credited transactions, it’s interesting to consider re-categorizing them to the credit card category—that actually makes sense now that I think about it. Thanks for the tip! Too bad Quicken doesn’t handle that automatically!

Jillartstudio

@Jacob, Great tip on merging the two records to retain the metadata (for lack of a better term) and creating rules! There's no consistency in returned purchases, but as long as the amounts reconcile correctly in Quicken is what's really important. Both you and @volvogirl are really helping me get this sorted out. Virtual coffee cards to both of you! Thank you.

volvogirl

I didn’t say that. You need to categorize them to the same category as the original purchase. Like Clothing.

volvogirl

oh I guess that’s what you meant. I thought you meant you put them to the credit card account like Visa.

jacobs

@Jillartstudio said: My Amex transactions are automatically imported when I refresh, so I don’t manually categorize them. However, I check the categories monthly to ensure Amex categorized them correctly, and I occasionally make edits if needed.

@Jillartstudio That's actually not how categorization works. Amex transmits the dates, the Payee name, the amount, and possibly a memo, but Amex — and no financial institution — provides categories for Quicken to use. Transactions you download which have categories are actually categorized by Quicken, not Amex. How that happens is interesting…

As transactions are downloaded through Quicken's servers, they are fed through an "auto-categorization engine". This service uses crowd-sourced historical data to determine a category to apply to Payees it can identify.

When the transactions download to your desktop Quicken, the category applied on Quicken's server can be changed if you have a saved QuickFill rule. These are "local" (on your Mac) categorization rules, which specify a specific category to use for a specific Payee. You can set Quicken to create QuickFill rules automatically as you enter/edit transactions, or you can create a rule manually based on any transaction that has the category you want to use in the future.