How to setup a credit card within Quicken (edit)

I always cringe when anyone says they have a "branded card". Why?

Because this is what is going on usually. The "branded" guy pays (actually it is more like they get a cut of the profits come to think of it, they don't pay anything) to have a credit card with their name on it and basically has no other connection to that card. All the real support of it happens "elsewhere".

The next part of this is that neither MasterCard nor Visa actually directly support any of these cards. Instead, some financial institution picks up the actual support of the account. In a lot of cases, the user never knows who that is.

That of course causes problems on exactly what "financial institution" to use, that is provided there were any steps taken to get it supported in the first place.

As for converting your CSV file to something that Quicken can import, see my website for the free program ImportQIF. Note that beside QIF it can also convert a CSV file to QFX which will work better with Quicken Subscription than a QIF file will. Setup the account, then the column mapping and then the QFX option.

https://www.quicknperlwiz.com/

This probably should be discussed offline; you can contract me through the contact forum on my website.

But just so that this isn't left dangling.

Quicken/QIF/QFX all expect charges to be negative amounts, so if they are showing up in the CSV file as positive amounts, they will have to be reversed. But watch out. -Amount reverses the sign of the amount, if they have both charges and payments as positive numbers, then reversing the charge amounts will also reverse the payments amounts. For that case instead you there should be another column like "Transaction type" (say with Charge/Deposit in it), that can be set to "Type" in the column mapping and ImportQIF will prompt you to say if "Charge" is means the amount is positive or negative.

As for the payments to the credit card go, this is where the changes to the QIF import in Quicken Subscription really matter, and where using the QFX format might be the better choice.

When you have a payment the proper way to record it is a transfer from your checking account to the credit card account. With QFX you can match a download amount to this transfer. But with Quicken Subscription's QIF import the downloaded payment will go directly into the register and will not give you a chance to match it to a transfer.

If one is using Quicken Subscription, my recommendation is to use QFX as the output format, because then you can just use all of Quicken's normal features to handle the importing.

If one is using a version before Quicken Subscription, or with an expired subscription, one can't do a QFX import, so you would be stuck with QIF. Before Quicken Subscription the importing of a QIF file can use all Quicken's import features with the exception of renaming rules.

Note that one of the big differences between QIF and QFX is that QIF files/transactions can have categories in them, whereas QFX files can't. Nothing can get around the fact that you can't match existing transactions in Quicken to downloaded one with Quicken Subscription's QIF import, but if the category is already in the QIF transaction it will just go right into Quicken that way. And a transfer has the syntax of a category of [Other Account].