Remembering Categories from Previous Month

bseligson

I don't know if this idea ever came up, or possibly even exists. I have 4 cc and I categorize all charges — big job but helps me with budgeting. I have one credit card that I use exclusively for some repetitive pays: utility, medical premium, monthly subscription, etc. .Some of the amounts vary, some are variable, but the categories remain the same. I would like to take my September bill to be copied for the month of October. I would then have all the categories. All I would have to do is change the total amount and change some of the variable amounts to balance. So easy! Has this ever come up? Assuming not available. How do we get Quicken to offer this function?

jacobs

There's actually a lot to unpack here, if I understand your request correctly.

It sounds like you are entering one transaction for the monthly credit card bill, with splits for each of the individual charges. While that works, it's not optimal and sort of fights upstream against how Quicken is designed to work.

Typically, for each credit card, you would create a separate credit card account in Quicken. You can download the transactions from these financial institutions or you can enter them manually. And for recurring charges, you would set those transactions up as scheduled transactions occurring each month. So in your credit card account, these transactions would pop up automatically, and you would simply click the transaction and the "Paid" button to mark is as a transaction posted to your account; at that time, if the amount varied, you could edit the transaction to the correct amount. Then, when you pay the credit card bill, you'd enter that payment in your checking account with no splits, as a transfer to the credit card account. This way, you can reconcile your credit card account each month against your credit card statement, and all your charges show up on the date they were incurred, not the date of the credit card payment. It also makes it easier to split specific credit card charges (e.g. an Amazon charge which is part groceries and part clothing), since each charge is its own transaction.

If you decide to keep going the way you're currently doing things, and not switch to having a credit card account with the individual transactions, you could achieve what you want in either of two ways. One would be to click on last month's credit card payment, with all its splits, and select Transactions > Duplicate Transaction. Then open the duplicate, set the date to this month's date, and edit the amount and splits as needed. The other way is to create a QuickFill transaction when you enter/edit the credit card transaction. This way, the next time you enter the same Payee the entire transaction you saved will pop up, complete with all your splits.

If you need help understanding or implementing any of this, just post back.