There's nothing quick about it

February 28, 2010 5:44 AM

One the nice things about Quicken is I can input the dates that bills are due. Quicken says it will try to correlate payment transactions in your bank account with the bills that are due so that it doesn't tell you a bill is overdue when you've already paid it. It doesn't do this at ALL. What gives?

To be clear, we are not interested in using Quicken to actually pay our bills, I just want to keep track of the bill due dates for estimation purposes. We're going to keep paying our bills manually.

This is what I want Quicken to do, and which I could have sworn it claimed to do:

1. I want to be able to say, for example, that the cable bill is $70 the 4th of every month, so that my estimate of available money is not $X, but $X-70. It does this at first.

2. When I use the cable company's website to pay the $70 and this transaction appears in my bank records, I want Quicken to see that and recognize that I paid the cable bill. It does NOT do this.

Instead, it doesn't recognize that any payment has been made and eventually shows the bill as overdue. Bills start piling up in Quicken as "overdue" and it starts screwing up the estimates of how much money is actually available. After it does this for a month or so it may as well be a random number generator for as helpful it is for planning anything. Since the key reason I'm using the software -- and why we switched from Mint -- is to have sort of a monthly projection of these things, right now it's worthless to us.

I can't even find any obvious option of how to manually correlate a transaction with a bill being paid. Sad as it is, I would be willing to manually correlate the bills every month even though it'd be annoying, just to get an accurate estimate of our finances. Whatever terms I'm using to Google this aren't coming up with anything. What am I doing wrong or what option am I missing? Quicken can't really be this worthless, right?

posted by Nattie to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

One thing is that you have to make sure that the Payee name on the downloaded transaction matches up to the scheduled bill. Usually what comes from the bank is junky but you can fix it before you enter the transaction and it should remember that for future downloads.

When you accept the downloaded transaction, Quicken should pop-up a box that says "This seems to be the scheduled transaction for whatever date. Correct?" Clicking OK there is what marks the bill as paid. So if you don't get that, you need to manually mark it as paid right then.
posted by smackfu at 6:15 AM on February 28, 2010

I don't use Quicken, but I worked on a similar product for awhile. I can tell you that doing this kind of transaction matching automatically is not easy at all. It's nontrivial algorithmically, error prone due to several different possible, unrelated issues, and the info that Quicken actually gets from banks is almost certainly absolute trash.

That being said, you ought to be able to edit the register manually. Giving you help on how to do this is hard because I don't know the version of Quicken you're using, or what you've tried so far. I would look at the support section of quicken.com. The term you want to be searching on is "match". All Intuit's products call this process of correlating OLB transactions with manually entered transactions "matching". I don't see the term anywhere in your post, so maybe that's part of the issue.
posted by crinklebat at 11:23 PM on February 28, 2010

A simple way to manually prevent bills from showing as overdue is to click the "skip" button next to the schedule transaction in your list. This will move the due date to the next month (or whatever the billing interval is). If you click "skip" as often as you pay a bill, your projections shouldn't be off.

I use Quicken 2006, but I imagine this advice applies to your version.
posted by Vorteks at 12:30 PM on March 12, 2010