Issue with segregating transactions from credit card account

[Larry]

I am the primary card holder on a credit card account. My wife is
secondary on my account and has her own card with a unique credit card
number. This is a card we pay off monthly and I am trying to track my
transactions separately than hers. When I sync up and download my
information I get her transactions and mine. The only way I have of
removing her transactions is to look online and delete her
transactions from my Moneywell account ledger.

Questions: 1) Can MoneyWell segregate these transactions 2) If not,
does/should MoneyWell recognize when a transaction has been downloaded
and deleted? To date I have been deleting my wife's transactions.
However, when I download to update my ledger at a later date, I keep
getting some of my wife's transactions that I have already deleted
from my ledger. It would be handy if MoneyWell somehow tracked that
the transactions had already been downloaded and ignore them so that I
would not have to continually delete my wife's transactions.

I hope this makes sense and perhaps someone has had a similar issue
that could provide some guidance.

Thanks for any help,
Larry

[Kevin Hoctor]

Hi Larry,

If your credit card company doesn't segregate these, then MoneyWell
can't and probably shouldn't. Even though it is a different card
number, it's the same credit card account and you should be tracking
it as one account. I would also suggest that you keep both your and
your wife's transactions in the same MoneyWell document. It's very
hard to maintain two separate envelope budgets and not have any cross-
pollination.

Having two documents leaves room for error.

Peace,

Kevin Hoctor
ke...@nothirst.com
No Thirst Software LLC
http://nothirst.com
http://kevinhoctor.blogspot.com

[Lance]

On Jun 15, 6:14 pm, Larry <lwas...@me.com> wrote:
> I hope this makes sense and perhaps someone has had a similar issue
> that could provide some guidance.
>

Hi Larry,

Why don't you want to track your wife's transactions in MoneyWell as
well? If nothing else, it would ensure that all her transactions are
properly accounted for and her share of the balance gets paid.
Treating some of your transactions in this "under the table" manner
can be dangerous as it's not hard to make a mistake and end up
thinking you have more money to spend than you really do.

Regarding the issue you describe (MoneyWell redownloading deleted
transactions) I also ran into this when I started using MoneyWell. I
think the problem is that MoneyWell will download whatever the maximum
range of transactions your bank will provide. If you've previously
deleted some of those and then do another download, MoneyWell doesn't
realize this and keeps adding them back. This drove me crazy for a few
weeks when I first started, but eventually solved itself when my
bank's download window went past those deleted transactions :)

-Lance

[Larry]

We do have only one MoneyWell document. We each have our own checking
account. My wife is able to download the credit card transactions
related to her account without seeing mine so we are accounting for
all transactions. It is my account that has this issue of seeing/
getting both of our transactions.

What about the question related to MoneyWell recognizing that a
transaction has been downloaded even though the transaction has been
deleted from my ledger?

Thanks,
Larry

[Kevin Hoctor]

On Jun 16, 2009, at 7:45 PM, Larry wrote:

> We do have only one MoneyWell document. We each have our own checking
> account. My wife is able to download the credit card transactions
> related to her account without seeing mine so we are accounting for
> all transactions. It is my account that has this issue of seeing/
> getting both of our transactions.
>

Hi Larry,

That is a strange way to split up a credit card. My only suggestion is
to avoid downloading using your wife's access and only use yours.

> What about the question related to MoneyWell recognizing that a
> transaction has been downloaded even though the transaction has been
> deleted from my ledger?

MoneyWell can't tell that a deleted transaction has already been
downloaded. It uses the existing transactions to compare against and
if one if missing, MoneyWell will add it as if you accidentally
deleted it.

Peace,

Kevin Hoctor
ke...@nothirst.com

[Larry]

Lance,

Thanks for the response. My wife's transactions are tracked. We each
have our own income buckets. It is just that when she downloads data
from the credit card, she only gets her transactions. So, it is very
easy for her to track her spending while I am having to delete her
transactions from my ledger in order to track my spending. I suppose
this complication is due to us each having our own checking accounts
while our budget uses both incomes.

Larry

[Lance]

On Jun 16, 6:31 pm, Larry <lwas...@me.com> wrote:
> Lance,
>
> Thanks for the response.  My wife's transactions are tracked.  We each
> have our own income buckets.  It is just that when she downloads data
> from the credit card, she only gets her transactions.  So, it is very
> easy for her to track her spending while I am having to delete her
> transactions from my ledger in order to track my spending.  I suppose
> this complication is due to us each having our own checking accounts
> while our budget uses both incomes.
>

Seems like the real problem here is that you are sharing a credit
credit account but you only want to see your expenses in MoneyWell.
Even if your wife is properly tracking everything on her side (outside
of Moneywell), by tracking only a subset of the CC transactions in
MoneyWell, you've now lost the ability to reconcile your credit card
account or have any easy way of checking that what MoneyWell thinks
your balance is matches your CC company. MoneyWell is definitely not
set up to handle this kind of scenario.

If you really want to keep this kind of arrangement, I think you're
either going to need to give up the built-in MoneyWell download
feature (and manually download just your transactions from your CC's
website and import those into MoneyWell) or find a way for your CC
company to restrict your account such that you cannot download your
wife's transactions with your username/password.

Your other option would be to create a bucket to hold all your wife's
transactions as you download them. You would never allocate any money
to this bucket (so it would build up a big negative balance) but you
can "hide" the bucket so you never actually see it. This could screw
up some of the MoneyWell reports, but that might be an OK tradeoff for
you.

-Lance

[Brent]

If I understand correctly:

* You both share one MW document
* When your wife downloads transactions to MW, it only loads her
transactions
* When you download transactions to MW, it load your transactions and
reloads hers

A few thoughts:

* It seems like it must be your Bank that is limiting your wife's
download to only her transactions. You may want to contact them and
see if they can do the same thing for your account.

* I don't know if it is 'standard' behavior, but I have noticed that
if I change the amount of a transaction after it is downloaded, the
next download does not change it back. Perhaps you can just change
the amount of your wife's transactions to zero.