Quicken forces you to use incorrect dates

fjjl

This is a list of accounts currently being managed by Quicken.

The first ten are deposit accounts. The primary DDA is Citizens 44XX.

The account highlighted in blue and the accounts below it are accounts used

By myself and my wife and children. All are my accounts.

When I move money between DDAs I transfer on line and enter the amount and payee in the account I am transferring from causing a debit transaction. By identifying the account to be credited using the account description on the right, a credit transaction is created in that account and they are tied together.

When a prescheduled payment for a credit card account (e.g. 48XX) is initiated (for example, today) by Citi card, a payment is credited today to the account and an ACH transaction is automatically initiated to debit my Citizens 4469 account for the payment, HOWEVER, the transaction at Citizens is not initiated today but rather, two days from now, meaning the dates of transactions FOR THE SAME PAYMENT are actually two days apart.

This is STANDARD INDUSTRY PRACTICE in the banking industry.

Unfortunately, with the last update to Quicken, someone with at a minimum, limited understanding of the ACH world, decided that from now on, the date of the debit in one account at one bank and the credit to the other account at the other bank must be the same or a duplicate transaction is created in Quicken for the bank being paid.

I spend the better part of one an one-half hours on the phone today, first with a service rep and then with supervisor Jonathan trying to understand the point of this “improvement” only to be told that the dates must be the same. The insulting part of the explanation by Jonathan is that the Banks insist that this is how they want quicken to handle reconciling. The solution I was offered was to go through the transactions and change the dates so they match. The problem with that is the date will ALWAYS BE WRONG in one of the Quicken account records and I imagine that will complicate downloading and reconciling in the future on at least one of the accounts. This is foolish as the date of transaction at each financial institution is different and makes it difficult for the institution to match transactions when inquiring, for example, to CitiBank, when the payment in question is 5/15 and to Citizens is 5/17. IT IS ALSO AN INACCURATE RECORD OF PAYMENT. The worst part of this fiasco is your software is now downloading duplicate transactions dating back to September of 2024, which in fact were already reconciled in Quicken.

In the past, your software matched transactions by payment amount, NOT date. The ones that did not match to an amount or had more than one transaction with the same amount were manually matched during the reconciliation process, with very few issues to resolve,

NOW under your new system, every account reconciliation that involves making a payment from one account to another when both accounts are in Quicken will require that inaccurate information be entered as to transaction date to accommodate your arbitrary matching rule, rather than simply matching amounts in the two accounts. I imagine there will be MANY dissatisfied customers such as me with respect to this change. I have been a “Intuit Quicken” customer since 1986, first using Quicken on an Apple LLC computer with floppy program and data disks.

I wonder how much consideration thought was given to the decision to simply change the logic of the software with no thought as to how the change would change the REAL WORLD FINANCIAL TRANSACTION RECORDS of your subscribers. I am a customer of 39 years who will now be seeking an alternative to Quicken, and if not another commercial program will likely be setting up multiple worksheets in Excel.

[Moved to Quicken Classic for Windows section/Edited - Readability]

UKR

Before anybody starts responding to this question …
This discussion is currently categorized as belonging to Quicken for Mac.
@fjjl , your community user profile indicates that you are a Quicken for Windows user.
Which category does this discussion belong to? Q Windows or Q Mac?
I'm asking because there may be functional differences between Windows and Mac Quicken versions, so a correct answer depends …

mshiggins

Humm, does not sound like QWin behavior.

NotACPA

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20491204#Comment_20491204

Actually, it is. In QWin, both sides of a txn have the same date … even if in the real world a txn might take a day or two until it's recorded by the other FI.

I however, consider that to be proper behavior. Just as when you write a check it's immediately a debit in your checking account in Q even though it could take some time before it actually clears your bank.

That's why we "reconcile" accounts … meaning to note and explain any differences, and not "balance" … meaning that they're the same amounts between Q and the FI.

RickO

Also in QMac, both sides of a linked transfer always have the same date. It's always been that way in modern QMac. You can add the Posted column to the register to view the date the FI says the transaction was posted if that helps.