Is it possible to have a scheduled payment due for an amount that changes each month?

cmartin1069

I pay my credit cards each month. I'd like to have them appear as scheduled payments in my checking account, based upon the balance of the credit card account in Quicken. so it changes each month.

Jim_Harman

The short answer to your question is Yes.

Have you set up your credit cards as Accounts in Quicken? That would be the place to start. Then each credit card charge is listed in the account and you can assign them appropriate Categories. Your credit card payments are then transfers from your checking account to the credit card account.

With that setup, you can create Reminders for the transfers. When you set up the Reminder, the first option under Optional settings should be Remind me xx days in advance, not Auto enter. That way when you accept the Reminder you have an opportunity to specify the actual amount to pay. Another optional setting is Estimate amount for me and for a transfer to a credit card account, one of the options is to base the estimate on the current credit card balance.

That estimate is often not very good if you pay the balance in full, because right after a payment it will be lower than the next full payment and after the next closing date the estimate will be higher than the amount due. I generally use the option to estimate the amount based on my last three payments.

Another option is to link the Reminder to an online bill. With that option, Quicken uses a 3rd party provider to access your credit card statement and pay it from your checking account based on the balance it sees. In that case I believe the estimate will be zero until a new bill is posted. You could try that, but I found it to be unreliable for such an important process.

A better process IMO for the actual payments is to set up "Auto pay" with the biller, where they take the money directly from your checking account. That way Quicken is monitoring an automatic process rather than imposing additional steps.

Once the Reminder is set up, you can choose to display the Reminders in your checking account register by clicking on the gear at the top right of the Register and selecting Reminders to show in register. Reminders will have a little clock icon in the register's Status column.

TomUpNorth

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7959013/is-it-possible-to-have-a-scheduled-payment-due-for-an-amount-that-changes-each-month

I always pay our CCs in full each month as well, and have Reminders set to "Estimated Amount". But as soon as I know exactly what the upcoming payments need to be, I use my bank's Bill Pay feature to set them all up, and then Enter each Reminder which causes them to show in the register.

For me the greatest feature/help of Quicken is the monthly calendar, which shows the day-by-day balance of my payment account (Checking account) so that I know when I'm going to be short, and have to add funds, or when I am going to have excess funds in which case I plan to stick the extra into a better-interest-paying Savings account.

Jim_Harman

If you have Reminders set up for your regular income and payments, another very useful Quicken feature is the Projected Balances graph, available on the Bills & Income tab and elsewhere. Of course the data is only as good as the estimates you have set up.