How To Pay Credit Cards
January 18, 2022
No one likes paying late fees or interest. Ploutos Budget is designed to help you not spend more than the money you currently have.
- Transaction Form
- Credit Card Balance
- Pay Credit Card
- Sibling Transactions
- Posted Link Transactions
- Credit Card Link Transaction
- Note
Transaction Form
When you first start your budget by default your payee list will only contain a list of your current accounts (If you have added any). These are automatically created for you whenever you add a new account. See our article on How To Transfer Money Between Accounts to find out more about these.
In this article we will be focusing on paying credit cards.
Credit Card Balance
Your credit card balance is figured into your current available dollars, so if you have not overspent in any of your categories or overspent your budget you have enough to pay the full balance. This is the ultimate goal to get and stick to every month if you are a credit card user, so that we are not paying any fees or interests.
Pay Credit Card
-
Amount - Enter the amount you want to pay towards the credit card as a negative amount.
-
Payee - Select THE_NAME_OF_YOUR_CREDIT_CARD from the Transfers list for the payee field.
-
Category - We do not need a category.
-
Account - Which account are we using to pay the credit card?
Sibling Transactions
Just like it does when transferring money, Ploutos Budget will automatically create a sibling transaction. Based on the example above there will be a sibling transaction automatically created for a positive amount in our credit card transactions representing the payment we made to it.
We created the transaction for -$1,230.00 from our Checking account. Ploutos Budget automatically created a transaction for a positive $1,230.00 to our Credit Card account. If we delete either of these transactions the other will be automatically deleted also.
Below we will go over the same process when bank accounts are linked with financial institutions.
Posted Link Transactions
If one or both of the accounts that we are making the credit card payment to/from are linked for automatic imports then when the payment gets posted by your bank the transactions will show up in the Link Transactions for that account.
Credit Card Link Transaction
When a link transaction gets posted and shows up in Ploutos Budget it will give a helpful name in the payee field to signify what it is, but it will not know it is a credit card payment to an existing account in Ploutos Budget. You simply need to select the appropriate Credit Card Payment account option in your payee list.
In this case it is a negative amount. This means the money came from our checking account, so we will select First Bank for the account field. The money came to our credit card, so in the payee field we will select AMEX from the Credit Card Payment options.
As before Ploutos Budget will automatically create the sibling transaction for you. If both of the accounts in this scenario are linked then you only need to add one of the posted link transactions as Ploutos Budget will automatically create the sibling.
Note
If both of the accounts that we are making the credit card payment to/from are linked then a linked transaction will show up for each account in the posted link transactions table. Since Ploutos Budget automatically creates the sibling transactions we only need to add one of the posted link transactions and can simply delete the other from the posted link transactions table.
Looking for more Ploutos Budget tips? Check out: