Best practices when entering your credit card
The main thing to keep in mind when setting up a credit is that we offer 2 main screens for credit card setup. The first is My Accounts which allows you to assign your transactions to a specific credit card account for tracking purposes. The other is the My Bills page. This lets you setup and schedule your monthly payments to your credit card. From the My Bills page, you’ll want to create a transfer from your Checking which you can create on the My Accounts page as well to your Credit Card since this is essentially what you are doing when you pay down a credit card. If you consider your Net Income, it’s based on how much you have in your bank account as well as how much you owe on your credit card. So when you pay down a credit card, your net worth stays the same since your Checking will go down and your debt will decrease.
The main issue people run into when creating a credit card transfer is how to associate this with your budget. When you create a bill or transfer, the sub-category you assign is directly tied to your budget so a withdrawal for that sub-category will decrease how much you have left. The part that sometimes gets confusing is people will assign both the from portion of the transfer and the to portion to the same sub-category usually title something like credit payment. The problem with this is they both cancel each other out in your budget so your budget left doesn’t change. If you want the transfer to effect how much is left in your budget, you need to only assign the withdrawal portion of the transaction to your budget sub-category. We do this for you by default when you record a new transaction against your bill.
If you tend to payoff your credit card each month, your bill amount will usually be different from month to month. What you can do is enter an estimate for your bill schedule and then change the amount by clicking on the amount link when you know how much is due on the card.