Add option for what is displayed as date for credit card transactions

jdparker225

It seems to me that, for credit card transactions, there are two dates of interest:

1. When the transaction was made between the consumer and the merchant
2. When the financial institution paid the merchant

As the consumer in these transactions, I care about the first one. But what is displayed is the date that the financial institution paid the merchant. Please add a setting that allows user to decide which date is displayed in the transaction register for credit cards.

Jim

volvogirl

I think you can add the other date column to the register. Go up to register settings (gear icon at top of register) and pick it. Maybe this post will help

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20487607#Comment_20487607

jdparker225

@volvogirl

The post you cite is not entirely correct.

With EWC+, Quicken gets txnOn and postedOn dates and it is postedOn that is displayed. Since, with EWC+, there is a choice, I'd like the user to have that choice. Perhaps a better suggestion would be to have two date columns available that are explicitly identified as transaction date and posted date.

With Direct Connect (and qfx downloads) Quicken only gets DTPOSTED which sounds like it should be the posted date. However I downloaded a qfx file from American Express and the date in DTPOSTED is actually the transaction date. Go figure. That is not true for other credit cards I have. I guess it is up to the financial institution.

With my updated suggestion, DTPOSTED and postedOn would populate the posted date column, txnOn would populate the transaction date column. So the transaction date would be blank if you are using Direct Connect or qfx downloads. The user could, of course, fill in the transaction date.

If you want to look at what Quicken is getting with EWC+ look at the Cloud Sync Log. The transactions are buried in JSON data in that file.

Thanks

Jim

Chris_QPW

I don't think this suggestion is going to go anywhere. Given that there are inconsistencies between the connection methods and financial institutions there are just too many things that would get more complaints from people than praise for the information. Not to mention there are plenty of people would object it changing the dates that they put in (which is what the date in the register has always been until recently, or the posting date if the user didn't provide one). And if an option was to be put in for just this situation, then it would get even more complicated.

There are at least 3 dates to any given transaction. The one that the transaction was initiated on (a person wrote the check), the next is the date that the financial institution got the transaction, and the last is the date it is posted. And one could even argue that there might be more like, I deposit a check, and they state that I can they are only going to credit part of it to the available balance for some period of time. The reason this is important is because along with these dates is the implied reconciling of the balance to any given date.

Note there is already this relatively new option in Quicken:

This means that the Downloaded posting date will override the one that the user entered.

jdparker225

@Chris_QPW thanks for noting the new option that I was not aware of. Good to know even thought I would not want to use it.

I agree that there appear to me to be inconsistencies in the way financial institution treat transaction date and post date. To borrow a phrase from my favorite movie The Princess Bride: "I don't think they mean what you think they mean." Where by "you" I mean the financial institutions or, perhaps, Google AI rather than you or me. I see trans date and post date in the statements published by my financial institutions and they don't seem to mean what I think they should mean.

However, it would appear to me that the date shown in Quicken registers was based on the fact that, prior to EWC and EWC+, the only date available to Quicken from downloads was posted date (or supposedly posted date). But with EWC and EWC+ there is something that comes with the downloads that is, alledgedly, the transaction date. Given that both transaction date and posted date are available in the downloads, it does not make any sense to me to not make transaction date somehow available for display.

I don't want my "suggestion" to be interpreted as a really strong preference about how it is implemented. I'll leave the implemention up to the the engineers at Quicken. The implementation could be done in a way that would reduce any apparent confusion: have the default display/treatment options leave things the way they are. If you don't use the oprions, you don't see a difference.

Thanks

Jim