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How do I prevent ATM withdrawals (transfers) from appearing as a credit into my "personal cash"

jimhanney

My ATM withdraws for my spending money come out of my local bank and are shown a a deposit into my "Personal Cash" account. I don't enter expenditures for the Personal Cash account and as a result it continues to grow each time I make a transfer/withdrawal. I don't know a good way to reduce the balance of the cash account without showing an expenditure (which I don't track). It's a significant amount of money over the years and it distorts my financial picture. I don't want to be bothered to track the expenditures. Has anyone solved this?

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Accepted answers

Bob_L

Why don't you just set up an expense category called "cash expenditures" and book the withdrawal to that instead of a transfer to your personal cash account?

volvogirl

Why is it showing up as a transfer? Delete the transfer in your bank account and change it to an expense Category. I made a category just called ATM.

Boatnmaniac

Go to Tools > Memorized Payee List > search for the Payee used with the ATM withdrawals and click on it > on the right side of that Payee's line click on the Edit button > then, in the resulting Edit Memorized Payee popup:

If my suspicions are correct, making these changes described here should stop Quicken from automatically entering [Personal Cash] in the category field when new ATM transactions download.

All comments

Bob_L

Why don't you just set up an expense category called "cash expenditures" and book the withdrawal to that instead of a transfer to your personal cash account?

jimhanney

Thanks for the reply Bob, but that is what I've done and what happens is the transfer of the money goes into my personal cash account and is added to the balance. Since I don't account for my daily cash expenditures nothing ever comes out of the cash account and it accumulates. If I do a forced withdrawal then that shows as an uncategorized expense, which can add up to several hundreds a month. I may be picking fly poop out of pepper, but I was hoping someone had discovered a way to handle this.

volvogirl

Why is it showing up as a transfer? Delete the transfer in your bank account and change it to an expense Category. I made a category just called ATM.

Boatnmaniac

If my suspicions are correct, making these changes described here should stop Quicken from automatically entering [Personal Cash] in the category field when new ATM transactions download.

q_lurker

Is there any real difference between:

Transferring to [Personal Cash] and then withdrawing from there to Uncategorized, ATM, or some other nebulous category, versus
Recording the transaction straight from the checking account to the same nebulous category.

I do both. I use a category called Petty Cash for me and a [Spouse Cash] account for the spouse. I don’t care about most of my detailed cash expenditures, but may want to track some of spouse’s against medical expenses, groceries, or similar. End of year, I reset the spouse account to $0 with balance going to the nebulous Misc Exp category.

Boatnmaniac

I see perhaps I misunderstood what the question is. I had thought it was an inquiry about how to stop ATM withdrawals from being automatically categorized as transfers to the [Personal Cash] account. What I posted above would very likely stop that from happening.

But if this is about how to categorize ATM withdrawals (or actually, any kind of miscellaneous cash withdrawal) that are used for petty cash, then I agree that these transactions should not be transferred to a fictitious account like Personal Cash but should instead be categorized. Whether you name the category "Petty Cash" or "Cash" or "Misc Expense" or "Cash & ATM" as shown in the picture I posted above or whatever is irrelevant. Select a category name that will be meaningful to you and then start using that category for every ATM cash withdrawal that you do not want to track with some other specific category. There is no need to enter any other specific information into the ATM transactions Memo field…just leave it blank because it is not important.

Why do this? Because no matter how you actually use that cash it still is an expense and should be accounted for, just like any other expense. If it is not being accounted for then your budget and various expense reports will not reflect what your true living expenses are. Then you would be under-reporting what your actual cost of living is.

And the benefit of expensing it to a category is that it will not screw up your Net Worth because of some bogus Personal Cash account that shows a positive balance that is not really there.

jimhanney

I was looking for an easy way out, I think. When I register in Quicken an ATM withdrawal from my local bank it automatically registered that amount into my "Jim Personal" or "Lana Personal" cash account. Neither one of us track our cash transaction (yes, bad, bad, bad). Missing any magic carefree method of cash management in our cash accounts, I guess we'll either 1) track expenses better, or 2) lump them into a separate category "Not tracked" or similar, Thanks for a great reply.

Boatnmaniac

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20468641#Comment_20468641

I don't think any of us posting here was suggesting #1. Some people do this but IMO that is overkill for what in most cases is nothing more then minor miscellaneous expenses.

I think we all were suggesting #2 which you can call "Not tracked" or anything else that you would like. We had suggested some other category names like "Cash", "Misc Expense", etc. Heck, you might want to even set up 2 categories…one for "Not tracked-Jim" and one for "Not tracked-Lana"…if you wish. It does not really matter what you call it as long as you are consistent in your use of it so you always know what it is.

Also, if you want to zero out your "Jim Personal" and "Lana Personal" accounts without impacting your current expenses: There are a few different ways to do it but perhaps the easiest and fastest way is to enter a debit transaction into each account for the full account balance. For the category enter the account name enclosed in brackets. For example, [Jim Personal] for your account and [Lana Personal] for her account. This causes the transaction to be made against the account the transaction is posted in so they will then not show up in your expense reports.

UKR

Please take a look at any bank account register's Opening Balance transaction

When Quicken creates this transaction, it categorizes the transaction to the same account register, enclosed in [square brackets]. This is a method to make the amount not show as either uncategorized or as Income or Expense in any report or view.

Since you're interested in not categorizing any of your cash expenses you might as well categorize any of your Cash Withdrawal transactions in the same way, using the checking account name in [brackets].

You can do this for all of your future cash withdrawals. Be sure to update any memorized transactions in your Memorized Payee List that you use for these cash withdrawals.

You can also do this retroactively for all historical cash withdrawal transactions, should you wish to clean up your "Jim Personal" and "Lana Personal" account registers.
Edit / Find/Replace to select all these transactions in the checking account and the replace the category with the [checing account name].
This makes all transactions disappear from the " … Personal" account registers, to clean them up without affecting your checking account balance. In effect, the cash's gone without being tracked as income or expense.

When you record such a "transfer back to the same account" transaction you will be prompted by Quicken if it's OK to do this … click Yes.