Bills and income

Question

I have my Quicken set up so that, under Bills and Income, my credit card bills appear as upcoming. It's useful because I want to make sure my checking account has enough in it to pay the credit card bills. The payments are on autopay and I don't pay via Quicken's billpay. However, it regularly fails to display the credit card bills. Right now every one of them says "awaiting next bill" even though three of them are due in the next couple of days. How do I fix this please? And also, how to I make sure this doesn't happen every couple of weeks? The credit cards are all with Amex, Capital One and Chase if that matters. Thanks

Tom Young · Accepted Answer

As I don't use that particular "feature" of Quicken, (a feature that garners lots of questions like yours in here), I can't tell you how to fix it, but here's what I do to always know whether I have the cash in the checking Account for my credit cards bill.

I'll mention that I have "Download Pending Transactions" turned on and I download into Quicken every day, so my credit card Registers always are very near to a "real time" correspondence with what the credit card balance actually is at the financial institution.

All my credit cards are setup to send me an email when a new statement is available, and all my credit cards use autopay.

When an email arrives telling my a new statement is available, frequently those emails tell me everything I want to know: the cutoff date for the statement, the balance as of that date, and the payment due date.  (If the email doesn't have the cutoff date I open the credit card site to pick that information up; it's not really necessary but I do record those cutoff dates in the Register.)

If the email tells me everything I want to see I open Quicken to that Account, create a $0 transaction with the word "Statement" in the Reference # column, and in the memo field I'll note that statement balance.  Then I'll use Quicken's reconcile feature to put "Rs" in all the reconciled transactions, as well the the "Statement" $0 transaction.

Then, without leaving the credit card Account I record the payment right in the credit card Register, as of the due date.  Of course the offset is to the checking Account so the future payment - typically something like 28 days from the statement date, is recorded well in advance and within seconds of finishing the reconciliation.  And the whole process takes just a minute or two.

Here's my most recent:

niven · Accepted Answer

Thanks Tom. I appreciate it, Good workaround, I do think, however, that Quicken ought to try to get this working consistently so I'll also pursue this with them. Thanks