I am using Quicken Premier 2010. I pay my credit card online through my checking account. Quicken correctly records the payment in my checking account, and shows the payment in the credit card account as a payment, but added it to the balance due rather than subtract it. I have used quicken for ten years or more and it has never done this. Any idea what is going wrong? Another odd thing is the account will reconcile as if Quicken is reporting the balance correctly.
Ok, one MORE thing. I just realized that everything after that entry is reversed. All charges are being deducted from the balance rather than added to the balance.
Edward wrote in news:i2p9jj$s4b$ snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-september.org:
I don't understand. Quicken is doing this all by itself? You don't do anything? No data entry by hand, no downloading? Please, we can't read your mind, you need to give details.
I had the same "problem". Turned out it was not a "problem" but a misintretation of the Quicken transaction. IIRC, Quicken shows the payment as a negative charge in the payment column. Anyhow, it reconciles fine.
No data entry by hand. I do not enter anything manually. All information is downloaded. Chase credit card. The point is, an amount in the payment column was treated as a charge by Quicken, and amounts entered in the charge column, were treated as payments by Quicken.
I'm not sure why you would assume something is not set up correctly. I found a duplicate entry of the payment from Regions Bank to the Chase account (that was downloaded automatically, and entered twice by Quicken); when I deleted one of the entries, Quicken recalculated all of the entries after the entry I deleted, and now the register correctly adds charges and subtracts payments. There is a glitch in Quicken somewhere, I just don't know where. It may be in how it takes the information from the Regions Bank account.
I have been using Quicken since about 1991 or 1992, and I have not had this problem before. Thanks for your help though.
Edward wrote in news:i2uel2$4gj$ snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-september.org:
That was my first guess. From what you said it appeared that the error does not always happen. Now you are saying that a(nother) single downloaded entry was inserted into Quicken twice? To me that sounds like improper matching (or nonmatching) of downloaded transactions, assuming you download from both FIs. Can you lead me through the whole thing once more, including how you match (or not) downloaded transactions?
I've had Quicken make mistakes very, very occasionally, or rather the file (system) of my data got slightly corrupted. (Or I had made a transcription error). Going to a backup fixed my problems. I never removed old data, and my file goes back to New Year's of 1999, when Dollars & Sense folded.
From your description, I don't think there is any glitch in Quicken.
When you overpay your credit card balance (no matter how, or why ... including, by accepting a duplicate payment transaction), your credit card balance will switch from a negative (displayed in red) to a positive (displayed in black). If you don't realize that the account is overpaid (if you don't notice that the balance amount has changed color), you may think something is wrong.
But when your credit card balance becomes zero, or positive (not a normal state for a credit card - most folks do not intentionally overpay their credit card bill), another payment will make the balance even more positive. And subsequent charges will decrease the positive amount (until/unless the amount of additional charges is enough to force the balance negative ... it's normal state).
I believe what you saw in Quicken was perfectly normal*, and correct, behavior.
[* I don't know why there was a duplicate payment transaction, but generally Quicken just presents you with the transactions that your financial institution provides to Quicken. Depending on what download method you use, you can verify that by looking in your OFXlog (Help > Product and Customer Support > OFXlog), or in the downloaded QFX file. Regardless of how the duplicate got in your "Accept transactions into register" window; once you Accepted that duplicate payment transaction, Quicken did just what it should.]
Thanks John. I restored an older Quicken file to check what you suggested and you were right. I did not notice that the color of the balance had changed from red to black and I was only considering the amount. That restores my faith in Quicken.
I download transactions from my checking account and from my credit card account. When the credit card payment is recorded in my checking account, it cross-references (if that is the correct term) my credit card account, and when I download from my credit card account, it records the transaction again. Something must have changed in the way in which Quicken accepts the data, or in the way the bank transmits the data, because I have not had a problem with duplicate transactions before. I haven't changed any settings.
I call that a "transfer" transaction - where entering one transaction creates a second transaction in the TO account.
This is a problem that seems to bedevil quite a few Quicken users; generally I think it's a matter of timing and taking precautions to insure that when the second half of a transfer transaction is downloaded, that the Quicken transfer transaction has already been created ... so the that downloaded transaction will have a Quicken transaction to "match".
It probably doesn't matter which Quicken transaction you process first ... which Quicken transaction becomes the "transfer" transaction. But it is important that the Quicken transfer transaction is created before Accepting the downloaded second half of that transfer.
In my case, my credit card transaction payment is downloaded before my checking account transaction for that payment (the credit card company clears the payment before my bank does). So I modify the downloaded credit card payment transaction to be a transfer transaction (so it has the checking account name in square brackets in its category field - which creates an equal and offsetting transaction in the checking account). Then when the checking account transaction is downloaded, it has a transaction in my Quicken checking account to "match" to. If Quicken doesn't recognize that the two should match - and gives the downloaded transaction a status of "New", I use "manually match" to make sure they match.
In theory, the above could be mostly automatic (say, if the credit card payment transaction was a scheduled transaction - with the correct "account category" that made it a transfer transaction - that entered your Quicken credit card account before either real-world transaction downloaded); but rather than assume anything, I always visually check before Accepting downloaded transactions (in this case, particularly before accepting the second half of the payment transfer transaction ... you can create the "transfer" transaction while the downloaded second half of that transfer is sitting in the "Accept transactions into register" window, if necessary).
Thanks again John. I really appreciate the time you take to answer questions and resolve problems on this forum. I have not had match duplicate transactions before, so I would guess that something changed in the timing that my bank processes payments, thus throwing off the sequence that has been working for years.
As I've mentioned here before, Merrill Lynch withholds federal income tax from the dividends that they receive in my account. (I could stop this, but it provides a few dollars buffer so that I never owe a penalty for underpayment of estimated taxes.) Each time I receive a dividend, ML downloads two transactions for me. The first is the dividend, properly credited to _DivInc, which I simply Accept. The second is the withheld tax, which they code as Cash, as though ML had written me a check to withdraw funds. I've learned to first enter a transaction to record the withheld amount and date, as an XOut to the [FIT Prepaid] Account. (I've created a few Memorized Investment Transactions for these.) Then I Accept the downloaded transaction and Quicken automatically Matches it to the withholding transaction.
(I've also learned that this is less hassle than first Accepting the withholding transaction and then trying to correct it. Q insists that I Delete the wrong version and then enter the correct version.)
re/"Q insists that I Delete the wrong version and then enter the correct version.".
Yes, I've "noticed" this in the past. Why is this? Why can't one just edit the original transaction to change some of the details rather than having to create a whole new transaction and delete the original, even though most of the information was correct (most notably, the amount).
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