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Combine credit card and banking transactions into same register?

kalderson454

Hello everyone. After 20+ years using Microsoft Money I finally made the move to Quicken. It's a great replacement and am happy with the decision to move, but am having a hard time trying to replicate the process in Quicken that I had built and used in Money for so long.

Here is how I worked in Money:

I use my credit card for all daily transactions, and as many recurring bills as I can. Everything in Money was manual input (one of the reasons I switched to Quicken), so I manually input all checking transactions into my register. I also manually added all my credit card transactions into the same register, and when it was time to pay the credit card every month, I input a transaction to my credit card as $0, since all transactions on that statement were already accounted for in my register, and marked those transactions as cleared, so when I reconciled against my bank statement, all those transactions were ready to reconcile. Was a tedious, but easy and routine process that I used for years to pay off my credit card every month and rack up the free points.

So here is where I am stuck and hoping someone more experienced than me can help. I can't figure out the best way to replicate this process in Quicken, outside of manually inputting everything as I have for years. I want to avoid manual entry as much as I can and take full advantage of the online updates from my bank and credit card companies, but obviously, they sync to separate accounts. Is there a way I can have all my credit card transactions automatically downloaded into my checking register to essentially replicate my previous process, but without all the manual entry? Or is there another way I'm missing that would achieve the same goal? I'm sure I'm not the only one out there doing it this way, so I'm looking forward to your ideas and learning your processes.

Thanks in advance!

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Quicken Kristina

Hello @kalderson454,

Thank you for coming to the Community with this question. Unfortunately, the answer is no.

There isn't a way to have both your credit card transactions and your banking transactions download into the same register. About the closest you could get to that would be to backup your Quicken file, then cut/paste the downloaded transactions from one account into the other account's register. That may still require some manual cleanup tasks, so that you'd be able to tell which transactions came from where.

I hope this helps!

Chris_QPW

If you are willing to do it manually you can get them all in one account, but you shouldn't.

If you want to download transactions, you need to mirror what really happens in the real world.

Download the credit card transactions into the credit card account, download the transactions that are in the checking account to the checking account, but the one transaction you should put in manually (or with a reminder) is a transfer from the checking account to the credit card account to pay off the credit card balance.

It you get that transfer into Quicken the checking (or credit card account) before you download that withdraw/deposit Quicken will match the downloaded transactions to the transfer and not duplicate it.

mshiggins

@kalderson454 you can enter the payment transfer transaction from the checking account to the credit card account ahead of time, then adjust the amount of the payment as often as you want to cover the balance in your credit card account. That will enable you to be sure you have enough in checking to cover the credit card payment.

One small bit of manual work, while using the transaction downloading to get the remainder of your transactions for the checking and credit card accounts.

mmpunch

IMHO, you would want an account for your checking account, and another for your credit card account, both within Quicken. You can setup Online Services with your financial institution that would handle each separately and connect in order to download all transactions without having to manually enter them. You can also set it up where you can review those transactions within Quicken before accepting them into your account registers.

Chris_QPW

One thing I would mention if the intention is to make sure that you have enough in the checking account cover the credit card then you might want to look into the projected balances graph. You can see it on the Bills and Income tab or if you turn on the "Classic Dashboard" on your Home tab you can select it as something to show there.

With that you can select both the checking account and the credit card account which would show whenever the credit card account balance is exceeding the checking account balance.

mmpunch

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20487267#Comment_20487267

Pretty Neat, I looked at that view…. I included my Bill Paying Checking Account, along with my “primary” Credit Card Account.

kalderson454

Thanks for the feedback everyone. Sounds like there is definitely a manual component to replicating what I have been doing in the past. I'll have to check out the projected balances graph to see if that will give me the same info. If it does, then that could save me a bunch of time by not having to do anything manually. Fingers crossed!

Chris_QPW

Just so you know, Quicken's "Automatic transfer detection" can be a bit flaky and as such the SuperUser's tend to recommend pre-entering that one transaction. I think though the process really depends on if you are using automatic transaction entry mode (where the downloaded transaction go directly into the register, and you review them there) or if that option is off and therefore the go into the Downloaded Transactions tab at the bottom of the register where you select one and then accept it into the register).

If you are using the Downloaded Transactions tab then you can change the "category" to a transfer, like [Other Account], before entering the first side of that transfer. And then the second side of that transfer will just match the now entered transaction that got created from when you accepted the first side of the transfer in. In this case you don't use automatic transfer detection because that doesn't kick in before the second side of the transfer is accepted into the register.

If you are using automatic transaction entry mode and you have automatic transfer detection on it will try to match the withdraw with the deposit based on the amount and approximate date. This tends to work pretty well for things like your credit card payment because the amount is unique but doesn't work as well if you have a lot of transfers that are of the same amount. If you use automatic transfer detection, be sure to turn on the confirmation so that you can check it before it turns the withdraw and depositing transactions into one transfer transaction.