Best Practice for Handling a Central Billing Account With Two Credit Cards? (edited)

Flopbot

For our business, we have a new CC that I've attached to Simplifi. All total, there are three accounts…

Two are actual CC's (one for me, one for my wife). The third is the central billing account. Whenever there's spending on a CC, it shows up in both account registers; the register for the CC that spent it AND the register for the central billing account. When it comes time to pay the bill, I really care about the central billing account. When it comes time for reporting, I just want transactions counted once.

I've never worked with a central billing account before and I'm not sure how best to handle it in Simplifi. Should I:

• A) Only connect the Central Billing Account and ignore the other two accounts?
• B) Add all three accounts, but somehow block the duplicated CC accounts from counting towards reporting, etc.
• C) Something else I'm not thinking of.

If I go with (A), what do I do with Recurring Series that are tied to one of the CC's? Do I just attach them to the Central Billing Account even thought that's not technically the account that paid them.

Thanks for any advise and thoughts!

Coach Aldair

Hi @Flopbot,

Since the individual card accounts are where the actual purchases are being made, you have the option of keeping all three accounts connected, but excluding the Central Billing account from Reports and the Spending Plan. This should allow you to continue tracking the individual card activity while preventing the duplicate transactions from the Central Billing account from being counted toward your spending totals.

You can do this from Settings > Accounts > ⋮ next to the Central Billing account > Exclude account transactions from > Reports (and Spending Plan if desired). Excluding the account from Reports won’t affect the account balance or Net Worth.

For recurring transactions, I’d keep those associated with the individual card account where the charge actually occurs, rather than moving them to the Central Billing account. The Central Billing account can then remain primarily for tracking the overall balance/payment activity.

Also, credit card payments are treated as transfers in Quicken Simplifi and are excluded from Reports by default, so the payment itself shouldn’t create an additional expense.

However, if the Central Billing account is able to record the activity from both cards, you also have the option of keeping only the main billing account connected. This way, you can avoid any potential duplication of the same transactions, if applicable. By doing this, you'll have to link the recurring series in this same account.

Hope this helps!