I was just looking at the Expenses graph for one of my credit cards. My dates are "Year to date"
The payments made to this credit card (transferred from another account) appear on the Expenses graph as a negative expense, with a category of "Other".
I'm sure that other accounts will appear the same... just haven't looked too closely yet.
Why do these payments appear on the Expenses graph at all? How can I see my TRUE expenses?
The simplest way to eliminate all transfers from a report is to exclude them on the Advanced tab in the report Customize dialog.
If you want to see some transfers, but not others, you'll need to use the Category tab in the Customize dialog to eliminate transfers at - what I call - the "account category" level. [See the "accounts" at the bottom of the Category list on the Category tab.]
I had this same problem. Essentially it is doubling your expenses on the cards. First as the charges in their categories, then as a 'credit card expense' when paying the credit card bil from checking.
Quicken Help recommends assigning the credit card payment as a transfer to the card instead of assigning a category as payment, credit card, other, etc.
It adds a little work each time you pay, but only shows the true expenses in the reports and spending results.
The date of payment from the checking account and date of payment posted to the credit card will be off a few days. Assign the transaction from the checking account as a transfer. Then delete the payment transaction that downloads from the credit card account when it shows up. You have got to do this because making it a transfer from the checking account creates a duplicate transaction on the credit card account, so you will have two payments there if you don't delete the downloaded transaction in the credit card account.
If you understand "transfers" in Quicken, you'll realize this isn't really true. [The op acknowledged transferring the payment to the credit card account).
Actually, I find this adds no additional work.
No. Do not delete the downloaded payment.
If you have entered the transfer before you ACCEPT the downloaded payment, the downloaded payment will "match" the half of the transfer that is already in your Quicken account. Not only will no "duplicate" be created when you Accept the downloaded transaction ... but you will get the advantage of having the existing Quicken transaction updated to indicate that it was "downloaded" (which will remove it from consideration for future "manual match" consideration), but will also have the "date posted" assigned to the existing Quicken transaction (albeit, in a mostly invisible way).
To repeat: you do not need to, and you should not, delete the downloaded transactions for a credit card payment ... or the transactions for any other legitimate Quicken "transfer".
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