Paychecks

Go to Cash Flow-Banking Activities-Set up paycheck. You may need to set it up as a one time deal. If you get a bonus every year or several times a year, you can use this one for that whenever it is needed.

Clark

I don't know what the "right way" is; but "one way" is to right-click an exisiting paycheck transaction in the register, left-click "copy transaction", right-click at the end of the register, left-click "paste transaction, and modify the results accordingly.

I'm not sure I understand this objection. I think you would just need to temporarily increase or decrease the gross earnings amount (one "number") until you had the actual amounts for the paycheck.

That's a lot more straightforward, but it would be nice if there were something to click on to enter a paycheck transaction directly. But thanks.

Now that the data came back from my bank, I can answer my own question. Quicken lets me match the downloaded deposit with several individual deposits, and then shows a difference of zero. But when I go to accept it, I get a message that I can match the deposit with only one paycheck. That's what I was doing, and it's an incorrect message, but what they seem to mean is that a single deposit cannot be matched with a single paycheck and anything else, paycheck or not.

The problem is that if my bank gets the deposit before I get the stub, I don't know the gross earnings. I know the net earnings. If I let Quicken put the paycheck in the register, then Quicken will let me change the net earnings, but then it wants me to fix the other numbers before it will accept the changes. If I use a calculator to subtract the expected net pay from the actual net pay, I could then add the difference to the expected gross pay, and then Quicken would accept it. The numbers would be wrong, at least until I straighten it out later, but it seems like a lot to go through compared to the old way of Quicken filling in an extra line in the split for me. Or I could assign that extra amount to a dummy line in the paycheck, which would be less awkward than changing the gross pay to an arbitrarily wrong amount. I was just hoping for an easier way.

I guess I didn't perceive this as being as onerous as you do.

If the net amounts are different, and especially if the ultimate gross amounts are different; there's a good chance that many, if not most, of the amounts in the *temporary* paycheck are incorrect. That would be the same for an old split transaction as well as the new form.

You are not obliged to use the Paycheck Wizard; if using a plain split transaction is better for you, you can still do so.

In one case, it's a matter of doing no extra work and Quicken filling something in. In the other case, there's no way of knowing what number can be filled in to get Quicken to accept things, short of doing the math. It's certainly not my preference.

Of course. But the old way I did things, the register balance would be correct, without doing any interim work. When the real stub became available, I would have had to have done the work that I would have done anyway. Having the tax amounts off for a few days isn't likely to be a problem, but having the balance off could be. If my net pay were $5000, not having it in the register could make it harder to judge what's what. If I were out of work on a Friday when my check went to my desk at work, and the bank got the direct deposit two days earlier to begin with, and I was planning to be out of the office for a week, then I would either have to live with a register that's off by $5000, with Quicken flagging things to let me know that I had a scheduled paycheck to be deposited, and that I had downloaded data that needed my attention, or I'd put things in prematurely so the overall register is balanced to the penny, my deductions were off slightly, and the data I'd actually use is up to date.

At least in my case, I can live with tax amounts that are incorrect for a few days or weeks, since I don't really need them until tax time, which is way beyond when this would have been fixed.

So having taxes off by a bit and having an extra entry in the split that's not categorized would not be much of a problem in the short run, but not having the net pay in the register would make things more confusing.

I understand that. I didn't come here just to whine about the way Quicken does this. I was hoping that somebody knew of ways to deal with these issues, I could say thank you, and then move on. I actually like the look and feel of the paycheck form so I was hoping that with a few tips, I could get around it. It's not that it's terrible to go back to the old way, especially since I was used to it, but I'd still prefer to use the new way.

I think that with your advice about the bonus issue, that part will not be a problem. Hopefully, I'll find that the stub issue is not a frequent problem. In the past, I didn't have to think about it, but if I make it a point to rifle through my wife's handbag whenever I have this sort of transaction and no stub for her, I might find that it's not a big issue. Only time will tell.