Set up recurring transaction on a cash account

MishaM

Hello.

I have a cash account for my car's value. I'm trying to set up a monthly recurring transaction to account for depreciation. Example:

Car value (cash account): 15,000

Monthly Recurring Transaction: 125

Car value after 2 months: 14,750 (125x2)

I tried setting up a recurring transaction in bills & payments, but it keeps expecting a transaction to occur and thus never debits the cash account. Is there a way to set up this functionality?

Thanks!

Coach Natalie

@MishaM, thanks for posting your inquiry to the Community!

If you'd like to track the value of your vehicle in Quicken Simplifi for net worth purposes, you'd do so by adding a manual asset account. You would then maintain the balance by adding manual transactions, which can be excluded from the Spending Plan and Reports if you wish to do so.

https://help.simplifimoney.com/en/articles/3469358-asset-tracking-in-quicken-simplifi

https://help.simplifimoney.com/en/articles/3569626-how-to-exclude-transactions-from-reports-and-the-spending-plan

Otherwise, we have an existing request for automatic car value tracking through integration with Kelly Blue Book that you can follow for updates (this feature will be available at some point in the future):

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/452/automatic-car-value-tracking

Recurring Transactions are designed to track things like expected income, bills that need to be paid, credit card payments, etc. I personally wouldn't recommend using this feature for something like tracking the value of an asset. However, it is true that Recurring Reminders do not convert to transactions; they instead need to be linked to a transaction, whether manually or automatically at the time of download. Here is a request that you may be interested in:

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/284/convert-reminders-to-a-transaction-on-the-day-they-occur-edited-1-merged-vote

And here's an article that goes over the Recurring Transaction feature in case it's helpful at all: https://help.simplifimoney.com/en/articles/3625912-managing-recurring-transactions

I hope this helps!

-Coach Natalie

DannyB

As far as I know this is not a functionality that is built into QS. Personally, tracking a vehicle's depreciation month-to-month seems a bit more work than it's worth.

Nevertheless, I believe if you want to track depreciation monthly you will need to do that manually. Incorporating a vehicle's depreciation into your Spending Plan via recurring transactions doesn't make sense since the Spending Plan is a tool to manage and plan out your monthly income and expenses and not a tool to manage your net worth month-to-month.

MishaM

It is overkill, but helpful for networth tracking for me - dropping the value by 20% once a year makes the net worth reports look off.

@Coach Jon @Coach Natalie unless this feature already exists, I will create a feature request.

SRC54

@MishaM I keep up with the expenses for my car for free with Carfax (Not pushing this!) and it gives me the guesstimate for trade-in. From time to time, I change the value of my car according to what it says. I don't use a separate account for both vehicles.

I pretty much do what I do with all my possessions and update the price but keep the same transaction date. The "Depreciation" I mark as a transfer with the Tag Depreciation. This way it is ignored by Reports and Spending Plan.