Tracking Reward Points

Hi John,

I no longer have Q2006D installed, but basically want you need to find is the flag to turn off the account from being included in your totals. In Q2009D, it is a flag on the Account that states "Do not include this Account in Net Worth total". I no longer keep track of this type of activity in Quicken, but when I did I used Credit Card accounts because of the ease of reconciliation. If you have many of these you might want to used a naming convention such as "Rewards=Northwest", "Rewards-Discover Card", etc. so they are all grouped together.

Oilcan

-----Original Message----- From: John [mailto: snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com] Posted At: Wednesday, November 12, 2008 5:41 PM Posted To: alt.comp.software.financial.quicken Conversation: Tracking Reward Points Subject: Tracking Reward Points

Forgive me if this has been discussed but what is a good way to track bonus points and Frequent flier mileage in Quicken? I am using 2006 Dlx and I remember that this can be done. So far I have a cash account set up with a balance of 23586. Quicken thinks it is in dollars. Unfortunately it is not - it is in points. Can I apply a conversion rate of some kind? I would like to do the ame with my Worldperk miles.

Any advice is appreciated from the group.

Cheers, john

I agree with Oilcan that you want to exclude the rewards accounts from any net worth reporting.

But I disagree MIGHTILY with the whole concept of tracking reward points in Quicken.

Quicken tracks DOLLARS. Income! Expenses! Assets! Liabilities! Reward points are, almost, assets but they're most definitely not equivalent to dollars.

When you receive them, you don't have INCOME. When you spend them, you don't have an EXPENSE. They're not convertible to DOLLARS.

KEEP THEM OUT OF QUICKEN!!!

There are any number of freeware "Reward Trackers" available on the net. USE THEM.

Let's not mix oranges and orangutans. (This doesn't even come close to oranges and apples).

db

Wow. That is kinda negative isn't it?

Actually the points I have from Wells Fargo are dollars. 2500 = $25 to be exact. So I do have income and when I spend then they are an expense. Perhaps you are not familiar which these types of things and how they work. They come in handy when the the old gift giving season approaches. So in a sense they are a cash asset. Somewhat like a life insurance policy - which I also track in Quicken. Much to your dismay I am sure.

I did remove the account from the totals and just went from there.

Cheers.

Well then, put the account back into the totals and just enter the points as dollars and cents. So if you make a purchase and earn 2500 points enter that in your Wells Fargo Points asset account as $25.00, offset to your Wells Fargo Points Earned category. When you look at your accumulated total in the Wells Fargo Points asset account mentally move the decimal point 2 places to the right.

Tom Young

I travel all the time on business. So I collect airline and hotel and rental car reward and bonus points frequently ... and none of them are translatable into a specific dollar amount.

In your initial message, you said nothing that contradicted my previous sentence, so I responded accordingly.

Had you provided even remotely complete info, the answer would have been different. In fact, you specifically cited "frequent flier mileage", which has NO correleation to dollars.

It's apparent that you haven't bothered to think thru your own situation.

db

I set up airline points as an investment account, and I set up one point as worth two cents. That's because I use my mileage exclusively for low season international travel from the US to Europe;. It's 40,000 points to get a flight, and if I were buying the flight it would be around $800, so two cents per point is roughly right.

But to tell the truth, I don't think that the amount from a dollar standpoint is terribly important. If each point were worth zero cents, my net worth would be slightly lower, but that doesn't matter very much to me. The main reason I do it is that I want to have someplace on the computer where I can keep track of how many points I have, and Quicken is an easy convenient place to do it.