Recurring vs. Schedule - Can someone explain?

Hi there!

What I'm trying to do is figure out what are my monthly recurring expenses. E.,g. rent, water etc. I'd like to just be able to mark certain payees as recurring so I can report on them.

Quicken has the scheduled transactions feature which I don't like using. One reason I don't like using it is that it sticks these reminders as scheduled transactions and forces you to take action on them. Why do I need that when my water bill has already arrived and has enetered into my register? Then it makes you click 'skip' for each one and it takes ages because I have a backlog. And you can't just select the lot of them and click delete or skip up until today.

So I don't want to be reminded like that, I just want to tag certain payees as recurring so I can get a quick snapshot of what my monthly outgoing is. E.g I get a water bill every month. I would like to mark the water company as a recurring biller so that I can view it with all my other recurring bills.

Any ideas r?

Reply to
Colm
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Do not know of any way to 'flag' future transactions and generate a report. However, let me describe what I do to accomplish what I think you are lookinf for - a look ahead for the month.

I have each of my regular income/expense items for my checking account set up as a scheduled transaction; each with its' normal payment date. This includes all regular monthly activity as well as quarterly & annual items [water monthly, auto insurance quarterly, vehicle registration annually, etc].

Setting the amount for 'fixed cost' items is obviously easy - e.g., cable TV monthly charge is fixed [until they change/raise it :

Reply to
JM

Reply to
Oilcan

I'm not sure why scheduled transactions isn't doing what you want, so let me explain what I do and how it works for me and see if that helps.

I have all of our recurring payments and income in Quicken as scheduled transactions. For those that are the same amount each month I have them set up to be entered automatically on their due dates. For those that vary, I have them set up to estimate the amount based on the last three transactions.

I have my Quicken Home tab set so that it shows a monthly graph of my checking accounts and savings accounts. The graph Quicken displays is a stacked bar graph, so it is also showing me the total cash I have available day by day throughout the month. I think that is what you were looking for.

When a bill does come in for a scheduled, variable payment item, I do one of two things. I may enter it in the appropriate check or credit card register and Quicken asks me if this is the payment that was scheduled and I click Yes. Other times I'll just go to the scheduled payment list and press enter and fill in the current amount.

Hope that helps. Bernie

Reply to
Bernie

Thanks for all your thoughtful replies. I guess I will have to learn to love scheduled transactions. I reset my recurring payments so they automatically are entered into my register. That way they don't build up as reminders.

Bernie wrote:

Reply to
Colm

As long as they are paid automatically that is exactly what you should do. It is only bills that you must pay manually that you would want reminders for.

Bernie

As long as they are paid automatically that is exactly what you should do. It is only bills that you must pay manually that you would want reminders for.

Bernie

As long as they are paid automatically that is exactly what you should do. It is only bills that you must pay manually that you would want reminders for.

Bernie

Reply to
Bernie

I pretty much do the same as Bernie had described. While scheduled transactions can serve as reminders they real intention is to eventually be an applied transaction. IOW when the time comes (or the bill arrives) the scheduled transaction gets "executed" resulting in an entry in your register. Then the scheduled transaction, having a recurrence setting, reschedules itself for the next occurrence.

Now one would normally think that when an expected bill comes in that you have a corresponding scheduled transaction set up, that the user would execute the scheduled transaction in response instead of entering the transaction anew. Somewhere around 2004/2005 I believe, Quicken changed such that if you didn't execute the scheduled transaction and instead entered one anew, it would sense this and prompt you "Is this transaction you are entering really this scheduled transaction you set up before?". However in order to do that Quicken needs some smarts and it needs to rely on certain things, like that the payee is the same and the category/transfer is the same, etc. I would also think it needs to be "close" in terms of date. IOW the date on the transaction you are entering should be close to the next scheduled date of the scheduled transaction. Yours are probably way off which might explain why you weren't being prompted.

As Bernie alluded to, I set up fixed recurring transactions to Online Repeating transactions which are sent out each period with no need for any interaction from me. I don't tend to use "Auto Entered" transactions as I fear that one day one might slip through that I didn't want to actually pay. Instead when a bill comes in I "execute" it's corresponding scheduled transaction. If the bill didn't come in for some reason, I rely on the scheduled transaction to be prompting me effectively saying "Hey this bill is due soon". I then look for the bill in case I have gotten a little behind in my Quicken processing. If I can't find it then I few the reminder as saying "Perhaps you should call up company X and find out why the bill didn't arrive yet".

I also don't like to have everything conjugate towards a single date like the 1st. Then you have the effect of on the 2nd you're technically broke! Though my scheduled transactions tend to hover around the dates I get paid or shortly thereafter nonetheless. I try to spread the bills around the month so there aren't as many of those dry periods...

YMMV

Reply to
Andrew DeFaria

I have read for a long time Andrew DeFaria's messages in this group with great interest: partly for the subject-related content, which I often find pragmatic and even illuminating, but also for the apparently never-ending stream of changing quotes in his signature.

I don't know what email software he uses. I don't know how he finds/generates these quotes, and it doesn't really matter that I don't know, but I certainly enjoy them and look forward to Andrew's continuing participation in this newsgroup.

Jay

Reply to
Jay M Apple

I avoid this issue simply by entering the transactions early [e.g., the

1st of month] - the payment dates are scaterred thru the month per the normal payment dates. Thus my transaction register is essentially a cash-flow schedule for the month and I focus on the running balance. I'm normally [hopefully?] not 'broke' till the end of month :
Reply to
JM

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Reply to
Steven E. Harris

signatures.

Reply to
Andrew DeFaria

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