reconciling multiple business credit cards

GKaufman3

I have Bank of America credit cards for business. There's a master account to receive payments, and child accounts for different user cards. When I download transactions, the payments go into the master account, and user purchases correctly go into the individual user accounts. When it comes to reconciling, the master account has the only statement, combining payment and user transactions. So the accounts can't be reconciled individually, and the balance in the master account, which only has payments, keeps increasing, while the user accounts don't show any payments so keep increasing too. I'm left to manually mark entries as "R". Is there a better way ?

NotACPA

Why do you have separate "child" accounts when, at the bank, there's only a single account?

I'll assume that you want to track each user's expenses separately … but you can combine all of those child accounts into the Master and use TAGS to track the individual's spending.

splasher

Each month, you could do a transfer of the current balance of each of the child accounts into the master account, thus zeroing out the child account and increase the master account to the amount of the overall account's balance. Then you could do the reconcile against the master account. If it doesn't reconcile, you would have to look at all of the accounts (master & child) to find the problem.

GKaufman3

it’s at the bank that each card user has a separate account, so they come into Q separately, yet only the master produces a statement to reconcile from.

Even if I make entries to balance the accounts, I’d still need to mark transactions in different accounts when reconciling from one statement.

splasher

Another option would be to COPY (not move) the downloaded transactions from the child to the master account each month, then reconcile the master. If something was amiss, you would need to make changes to both accounts affected, but if you are working solely with downloads, that should be minimal.

If you went this way, you could make the child accounts, "separate" accounts so that they are not included in the overall totals in the Account Bar and each month do a mass edit to change their CLR status to R, so that you know which transactions to copy the next month.

GKaufman3

Not sure what you mean by "separate" accounts not included in totals. And what you suggest re copying entries is about as cumbersome as what I'm doing now, no ? If somehow I could define in Q a parent/child account hierarchy, that might work.

splasher

Separate accounts are shown at the bottom of the Account Bar and are classified as such as shown in this screenshot:

 If somehow I could define in Q a parent/child account hierarchy, that might work.

Not possible in Quicken.