Year end reconciliation Income to expenses (Q Mac)

rawilkinson · January 17

Is there someone more experienced than I am have some advice on how to handle year end reconciliations? I use Quicken on the Mac.

All my credit cards have different close dates. At the end of the year I need to reconcile expenses to income. For a typical month all credit card transactions are downloaded and allocated to relevant categories. I draw income generally once a month from the bank on the first of the following month. This does not work well for the end of the year, December because I am using income drawn January the following year to pay December credit cards from the previous year. The income I draw each month is to pay past bills and also money needed for the month to live. For example my January 2026 income pays off credit cards accounts used in December 2025,as well as pay for January living expenses like house cleaning, gardener, cash needed etc.

The problem is when I run the report that compares actual spending against income at year end, it is inaccurate because part of the January draw is paying off December expenses. I figured that maybe I should draw money December 31 to pay off credit cards and another draw January 1 for January expenses. This could sort of work but even then when the credit caads close in January they still have some of last year's transactions.

I hope I have explained this sufficiently. This is probably not so much a Quicken issue but more of the best way to use Quicken to get what I need.

Thank you, Rose

Quicken Kristina · January 18

Hello @rawilkinson,

Thank you for reaching out! To better assist, please provide more information. Which specific report are you running to do your end of year reconciliation? Have you tried editing the date range so that those January transactions are included?

I look forward to your response!

rawilkinson · January 29

Apparently there is no way to do what I am attempting. I spoke with a Quicken expert and cannot do in Quick iMac.

Thank you Rose

John_in_NC · January 29

Howdy, @rawilkinson

What is your goal here? I think that is the missing question. 😊

I don't know if reconcile is what you want. "Reconcile" in Quicken is the same as it was long before computers: to compare that the transactions & balances in your records (Quicken in this case) jive with what is being reported by the bank. You have to do that on an account by account basis, and typically do it monthly as that how most banks prepare statements. You needn't follow the monthly regiment/reconciling against a paper statement, but that is the underlying logic.

Are you referring to a budget which can show you monthly inflows compared to outflows?

Do you have the ALL the credit cards individually setup In Quicken so that the charges all fall in the correct month incurred versus the month when you pay the bill? That is paramount, as paying the credit card this way will merely be a transfer of $ that won't affect income/expenses. If you don't do this, any reports/budgets in Quicken can be inaccurate.

I suspect what you are trying to find is a the simple question of "how much did I bring in this year compared to what I spent?" And, yes, you can find that in Quicken if you have it setup correctly.

Add some details, and we can see if we can help you out! Good luck.

jacobs · January 30

My understanding of your post was that you wanted an income and expense report at year-end which includes only income and expense from that calendar year. Is that correct? If so, you can definitely get what you want, but we need some additional information…

As @John_in_NC asked above, do you have separate credit card account(s) where each transaction is recorded on the date it occurred? So a transaction on December 31 is in your credit card account as an expense on December 31. The fact that the credit card statement period may span December 15-January 14 doesn't matter because each expense is recorded separately, and the bill payment is a transfer to the credit card account, not an expense.

Or… do you not have a separate account for each credit card, and when you pay each bill from your checking account, you create a transaction with many splits to categorize the spending from the past month? If you do it this way, that's part of your problem; you would need to be doing it the other way.

If you do have separate credit card account(s) which record individual transactions, then your expenses are not a problem; your issue is matching income with the calendar year, because you only draw income once a month. You're trying to match actual spending with cash flow, which doesn't work well for what you want. If this is the case, then I think you have a few options. One — which would not help you for this past year, but might be viable going forward — is to split your current January draw into a piece you take in December and a piece you take in January; two income transactions for that one time period to align your income with the calendar year. If that's not viable, or you just don't want to do that, then you can achieve the same result with a little bookkeeping magic. 😉

Create a liability account and call it something like "Pending Income". On December 31, create a transaction in this account using whatever category you use for your income. You're creating income out of thin air, offset by a liability of the money "owed" to you in January. Then in January when you take your actual income draw into your checking account, you'd record that as a split, with part going to your income category and the other part being a transfer to the liability account for the amount you entered in December. This zeros out the liability account and results in only part of the January draw counting as income in the next year.

Does that make sense? If not, let me know an I can create a few screenshots to illustrate, once you answer the question about how your credit card transactions/payment are handled.

Year end reconciliation Income to expenses (Q Mac)

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