Quicken Community is moving to Single Sign On! Starting 1/22/21, you'll sign in to the community with your Quicken ID. For more information: http://bit.ly/CommunitySSO
In Quicken 2007, I can create custom reports with categories and classes (229 Legacy Votes)
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Quicken, why are you ignoring all our pleas to make the program as good as it was more than TEN YEARS AGO!!!!!!!
Work began after Quicken 2007 debuted in 2006. But the first attempt at a replacement system was such a mess that it never made it past beta testing before it was killed. Quicken then bought Mint, and put its CEO in charge of Quicken. With a revamped plan and a new development team, a second effort to re-write Quicken Mac eventually came to market in 2010 as Quicken Essentials, which lacked investing and many other features. A more complete Quicken Deluxe was promised for 2011, but it never happened. The former Mint CEO left, and the Quicken Mac development team was disbanded. It took a couple more years before yet another Intuit management team was in place and decided to hire a new product manager and developers to build a modern Quicken Mac on the code base of Essentials. More than two years later, Quicken 2015 went on sale -- incomplete still, but including investment features, and a major upgrade for Essentials users. Now, three years later, Quicken 2018 has many more features, security updates and bug fixes -- but the list of large and small features users want number in the triple digits.
So no, no one "sabotaged" the product; there was a legitimate vision to re-create it, but the team was too small to do so quickly. And the sale of Quicken was not just about the Mac product; remember that Quicken Windows is still the flagship product of the company. (Intuit did say they weren't focused on Quicken, a very small piece of their overall business, and they sold it so it could have more of a chance to succeed on its own.) As for how "terrible" the current Quicken Mac product is, it's worth noting that there are more users of the modern Quicken Mac than the Quicken 2007 of old; although there are some of us still clinging to Quicken 2007, and some who are using Quicken Windows even thought they'd prefer to move to Quicken Mac, a lot of people find Quicken 2015-2018 at least good enough for their needs. Others will continue to hold Quicken's feet to the fire to deliver additional features and functionality until the program approaches Quicken 2007.
I haven't downloaded or bought Quicken for Mac for several years. I have tried, but nothing compares to the functions offered for the Quicken 2007 version. For my business I rely heavily on the flexible reporting functions of 2007 and what they used to call "classes." Any chance the new quicken for Mac has these flexible functions?
The good: yes, Quicken 2018 has a comparable feature to 2007 "classes". They're called "tags" now, and they're actually more flexible because you can have multiple tags on a transaction.
The bad news: the reporting in Quicken 2018 is still limited, and not nearly as flexible as Quicken 2007. This is an area of high priority, according to the developers, and last year they rolled out the foundation of a new reports engine which will eventually replace the limited reports that are descended from the 2010-era Quicken Essentials product. Right now, the program is a hodgepodge of the old reports and a few of the new reports, and it takes some exploration and experimentation to find what you can do with each. We've been led to expect some major improvements with the reports in the not-too-distant future, and eventually all the reports should move to the new system. We just don't know how soon we'll get additional changes, and whether they will arrive all at once or be trickled out over a long period of time. Right now, some people can get all they need out of the existing reports, but some Quicken 2007 users who used the heavily-customizable columnar reports find Quicken 2018 still inadequate for their needs.
Quicken allows multiple tags to be added to a transaction. The trade off is there are no sub-Tags like sub-Classes, so you lose the Parent/Child relationship between tags. Therefore, when converting over from QM2007, all sub-Tags are converted to simple tags.
This report type is certainly key to some, like myself, but the lack of report features does not stop there. I highly recommend you to add your VOTES to related IDEAS found on the:
- List of Requests for Report Related Features,
- List of Requests for Report Types
Click on each underlined link, then follow the instructions to add your vote to more related ideas. Your VOTES matter!with the essential ones described and listed here
For background, you may want to read this post too. BTW, the columnar-type report is the basis for MANY other reports, as described in detail in this post a little lower; only the selection and formatting criteria are different.
Also, take a look at:
Is Quicken for Mac 2007 (QM2007) Compatible with High Sierra (macOS 10.13)?
(If you find this reply helpful, please be sure to click "Like", so others will know, thanks.)
- Where to find a Help Guide for Quicken for Mac?
- Quicken Mac FAQ list
- Quicken Windows FAQ list
- Help Guide and FAQs for Quicken Mobile
COMPLETE list of Product Ideas - Quicken for Mac to VOTE onObject to Quicken's business model, using up 25% of your screen? Add your vote here:
Quicken should eliminate the LARGE Ad space when a subscription expires
(Canadian
The original reports in Quicken 2015 and 2016 are carry-overs from the under-developered Quicken Essentials product that was first released in 2010. The developers spent a lot of time over the past year re-writing a new reporting engine and user interface from the ground up, and this is what now exists as the New Report options in Quicken 2017 and 2018. The old reports still exist, and not all of the old reports have been replicated in the new reports yet, which makes this confusing for many users. The product manager has promised we'll see more new reports released this year as they work to completely replace the old reports with the new, more robust reports -- we just don't know what we'll get when.
Hopefully, the expanded new reports will show up in Quicken 2018 later this year. They're no longer holding new features for one big annual release. The designation of 2018 or 2019 should be largely meaningless except for their retail marketing efforts; new features are released as soon as they're ready. (But it will probably take until next year for many more of the features, large and small, that people value in Quicken 2007 to be created in the modern Quicken.)
It just seems that you folks made changes for changes sake forgetting all of the goodwill version 2007 had garnered in spite of the years to make improvements.
First, I understand your frustrations with reports in Quicken Mac; I and many other longtime Quicken users share them.
Second, please understand that your comments here do not go directly to Quicken, and it's unlikely that someone on the development team or senior management will read what you've posted here. It's somewhat unfortunate that Quicken utilizes this forum as primarily user-to-user support, with some limited support help from their forum moderators. But general comments and complaints likely do not get passed on very often.
Third, if you did software development then you should understand better than most users that "making the existing very satisfactory program work on a new platform etc. without giving up any features" is often impossible, as was the case here. The original Quicken Mac was built on old Mac technologies which have been slowly being retired over the years. It's not as if one can simply take the program and re-write it in a new development environment. Everything from the memory management architecture to the networking technology to the core database to the screen graphics is completely, radically different. (And, it should be noted, many of those under-the-hood changes are for the better, as any Quicken 2007 user who has had to re-index his/her data file many times due to unreliability of the old database can attest.) I wrote a system for my business in COBOL back in the early 1980s; moving it to a modern object-oriented development environment built around a SQL database required complete re-creation of everything from the ground up.
Re-starting from scratch has some positive and some limitations. It allows the developers to thin about whether there's a better way to do something. Perhaps a feature was developed 30 years ago because it was the only way to work around technology limitations at the time, and there's a better way to do it now. In some cases, features developed decades ago may not be used or needed any more. On the flip side, in some cases, the current development team might not understand the significance or use for certain old features, or might miss entirely that they existed somewhere in the code. In some cases, the developers chose to use shortcuts the macOS provides instead of spending weeks/months writing their own code; totals at the top -- one of my absolutely biggest complaints about modern Quicken Mac! -- is one such byproduct, because the MacOS frameworks provide a way to do this without writing tons of code. Same with the one-line register instead of the old two-line format; macOS provides an easy way to generate lists from a database, but the two-line format would require development of custom code for drawing everything on the screen. And the old way of doing that, which utilized deprecated Mac QuickDraw technology, is completely incompatible with modern Quartz/Core Graphics screen graphics layer.
And finally the unfortunate reality is that with a small development team, even after years of work, they're only part-way through the list of features from legacy Quicken Mac/Quicken Windows, despite a desire to achieve something close to feature parity. So we users are stuck with some steps forward as well as some steps back. Because each of us uses Quicken differently, we perceive those limitations anywhere from minor to show-stopping.
As I said at the start, I understand your frustrations and share them. I'm not apologizing or justifying for Quicken; I'm just trying to explain how we got where we are today. I continue to be hopeful that more and more items from the collective users wishlist will get added to the program over time, and that the modern Quicken Mac will eventually be a suitable successor for Quicken 2007 and Quicken Windows users. But I've experienced the slow pace over the past four years and know that we still have quite a ways to go before that dream is reality.
Meanwhile, you can add your VOTE for SubTotals on reports and Report Formatting Options.
First, click on the underlined link above to go there, then click VOTE at the top of THAT page, so your will vote count for THIS feature and increase its visibility to the developers by seeking to have the features you need or desire end up in the latest version.
You also want to add your vote to each of the components that make up the other essential related report features described here.
While you are at it, you may want to add your VOTE to related IDEAS found on the List of Requests for Report Types. Click on the underlined link, then follow the instructions to add your vote to more related ideas. Your VOTES matter!
(If you find this reply helpful, please be sure to click "Like", so others will know, thanks.)
- Where to find a Help Guide for Quicken for Mac?
- Quicken Mac FAQ list
- Quicken Windows FAQ list
- Help Guide and FAQs for Quicken Mobile
COMPLETE list of Product Ideas - Quicken for Mac to VOTE onObject to Quicken's business model, using up 25% of your screen? Add your vote here:
Quicken should eliminate the LARGE Ad space when a subscription expires
(Canadian
It is also very disheartening to hear that "Quicken utilizes this forum as primarily user-to-user support, with some limited support help from their forum moderators." I would expect more from a responsible software company.
Of course it's disappointing where we are more than 10 years after Quicken 2007. Former parent company Intuit made many, many mistakes that have cost us. Their first attempt at re-writing Quicken was such a mess that it never made it out of beta. Their second attempt was Quicken Essentials, which was significantly limited in functionality. Then they pretty much disbanded the development team, and several more years went by. When a new management team took over at Intuit, they decided to restart development and build on the base of Essentials to create a full-fledged Quicken for Mac replacement. I don't know for sure, but I believe the development team at that point was only a few people. The entire memory management had to be re-written to catch up to Apple's operating system changes, and everything about tracking investments had to be created because that had been left out of Essentials. The networking code had to be re-written because of security changes to Internet protocols. Even after the next-generation program debuted in fall 2014, required back-end changes to servers, and then the move off some of Intuit's servers after Quicken was sold, consumed large chunks of programming time. The saying "two steps forward, one step back" pretty well describes the saga.
To me, there are three positives to take from all this. One is simply that we have a modern Quicken for Mac. Quicken, at least on the Mac, could have died multiple times in that mess of transitions at Intuit. The second is that progress is clearly being made. It you compare Quicken 2018 with the Quicken 2015 of three years ago, a lot of features and improvements are evident. The third is that the current management has stated a goal and a commitment to bring Quicken Mac to feature parity with Quicken Windows. And yes, it's frustrating that it's taking so long and that we're still as far away as we are. But there is hope that holds more promise than just wishful thinking.
As for this forum, it should be noted that Quicken does provide official support by both phone and live chat; this forum is an additional place where users can help each other, but it's not intended to be a full branch of Quicken Support. Users can also report bugs or problems which don't require personal response to Quicken from a link on the Help menu. Saying they're not a "responsible software company" seems overly harsh.
2018 for Mac The LAYOUT of the 2018 TRANSACTION DOES NOT provide an option for the layout as provided in my 2007 SCREENSHOT where Classes (now tags) are at top of columns and Income/Expense down the left size. this was enabled in using Mac 2007 Income & Expense report, and REPORT LAYOUT:Categories down left side, Column headings Class/Tags across top
Please include this IMPORTANT report option for 2018.!!!!!
- Where to find a Help Guide for Quicken for Mac?
- Quicken Mac FAQ list
- Quicken Windows FAQ list
- Help Guide and FAQs for Quicken Mobile
COMPLETE list of Product Ideas - Quicken for Mac to VOTE onObject to Quicken's business model, using up 25% of your screen? Add your vote here:
Quicken should eliminate the LARGE Ad space when a subscription expires
(Canadian
- Where to find a Help Guide for Quicken for Mac?
- Quicken Mac FAQ list
- Quicken Windows FAQ list
- Help Guide and FAQs for Quicken Mobile
COMPLETE list of Product Ideas - Quicken for Mac to VOTE onObject to Quicken's business model, using up 25% of your screen? Add your vote here:
Quicken should eliminate the LARGE Ad space when a subscription expires
(Canadian
Please reference the new conversation here: Creating a Tax Report in Qwin Home and Bussiness
I would like to be able to see a category summary report, i.e. current YTD, and have columns for different tags. I have 3 businesses and each has a tag. My personal transactions have no tags. I would like to pull a category summary report and see the four columns and the total, such as Quickbooks will do with the P&L by class report.
I am aware I can pick which tags to include in the report, but I would like to see side by side the different tags as well as the total for ease in making sure things are posted to the correct company.
Thanks!