In Quicken 2007, I can create custom reports with categories and classes (229 Legacy Votes)

Unknown

Quicken Marcus said:

Thank you.  The picture in your description is perfect.  No this functionality is not yet available in Quicken for Mac but it's a top requested item and something we are seriously considering for our 2017 release.  Unfortunately the Quicken 2007 code is too old to just re-use so we have to rewrite everything from scratch which takes time.  

Quicken for Mac 2018 is out and improvement of the reports situation still has not been completely addressed. Will 2019 version fare any better? 50 default reports available in Quicken 2018 for Windows, only 7 for Quicken for Mac 2018. Only 3 customizable report types available for Mac.

Unknown

Quicken Marcus said:

Thank you.  The picture in your description is perfect.  No this functionality is not yet available in Quicken for Mac but it's a top requested item and something we are seriously considering for our 2017 release.  Unfortunately the Quicken 2007 code is too old to just re-use so we have to rewrite everything from scratch which takes time.  

Quicken for Mac 2018 is out and improvement of the reports situation still has not been completely addressed. Will 2019 version fare any better? 50 default reports available in Quicken 2018 for Windows, only 7 for Quicken for Mac 2018. Only 3 customizable report types available for Mac.

Unknown

Quicken Marcus said:

Thank you.  The picture in your description is perfect.  No this functionality is not yet available in Quicken for Mac but it's a top requested item and something we are seriously considering for our 2017 release.  Unfortunately the Quicken 2007 code is too old to just re-use so we have to rewrite everything from scratch which takes time.  

Mtech the "big bang releases" are a thing of the past.  "Quicken 2019" and "Quicken 2018" will both be incrementally changed as time goes on.  And they will in fact be the same release.

Most likely marketing will call it Quicken 2019, but in fact Quicken is now on a subscription mode so "2018" and "2019" will "be the same".

Over time the "subscription Quicken" (which is what really is) will get the features as they are added.

Unknown

While everyone is busy dissecting the Hows and the Whys of Quicken coding, could anyone offer a suggestion on how to build a decent report?  I need category details by tag. The report results aren't even close, and often include transactions that aren't remotely related to the filter criteria.  I've just finished entering almost a year's worth of data and now discover that I can't create a clean report for tax estimates. Do I need to re-enter it all in 2007? How do I get it loaded in Sierra 10.12? any help would be appreciated. 

jacobs

Laura, just quickly before anyone gets to the meat of your question, can you indicate if you are using Quicken 2016 (the version mentioned when this thread was created), or are you using a newer version? Reports capabilities have changed between Quicken 2016, Quicken 2017, and the current subscription version, so I didn’t want to make a wrong assumption in replying.

smayer97

Quicken Marcus said:

Thank you.  The picture in your description is perfect.  No this functionality is not yet available in Quicken for Mac but it's a top requested item and something we are seriously considering for our 2017 release.  Unfortunately the Quicken 2007 code is too old to just re-use so we have to rewrite everything from scratch which takes time.  

This is an IDEA thread so this discussion does not belong here. Please either wait until this discussion is forked into a new separate thread or please start your question over in a new Question thread.

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Brad1

Quicken Marcus said:

Thank you.  The picture in your description is perfect.  No this functionality is not yet available in Quicken for Mac but it's a top requested item and something we are seriously considering for our 2017 release.  Unfortunately the Quicken 2007 code is too old to just re-use so we have to rewrite everything from scratch which takes time.  

Are you kidding me?  We can't be witness again to the same Windows/Mac disparity of the past decade that brought us to this sad state of affairs.  I mean, really, Quicken.  Get it together!  Don't release features in Windows until they're done on BOTH Windows and Mac.  Insulting.

jacobs

Quicken Marcus said:

Thank you.  The picture in your description is perfect.  No this functionality is not yet available in Quicken for Mac but it's a top requested item and something we are seriously considering for our 2017 release.  Unfortunately the Quicken 2007 code is too old to just re-use so we have to rewrite everything from scratch which takes time.  

Brad, there are separate development teams for Quicken Mac and Quicken Windows. I'm sure there's internal communication, but the two products have different features and have different short, medium and long-term needs. I'm a longtime Mac user, and I couldn't wish harder for the Mac version to regain some of the features that existed in the venerable Quicken 2007, or in Quicken Windows. But I also don't feel there's any reason Quicken Windows users shouldn't get bug fixes or improvements while the Mac team works to improve the Mac product -- and I don't see that as insulting in any way to Mac users. The Mac product under Intuit was always the smaller, lesser stepchild of the Quicken family. Under private ownership, the Quicken CEO has committed to making the Mac products reach a level comparable to the Windows products; they have hired more Mac development staff, and they have been knocking off feature requests from users -- slower progress than any of us want, to be sure, but progress nonetheless.

smayer97

Another key feature that needs to be included in the creation of reports is the 
Ability to Include $0 (zero) Transactions in Reports.

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Unknown

Alan said:

Having developed a software system for my retail business in the early 1980s, I can appreciate the difficulty in design, development and testing.  However, what I cannot fathom is that Quicken 2007 from a user functioning point of view was very good.  It provided all of the necessary elements to an effective accounting system that was user friendly.  It would seem the better approach would have been NOT to reinvent the wheel but to simply make the existing very satisfactory program work on a new platform etc. without giving up any features.   Version 2018 is so foreign to 2007 that is frustrating.  Simple things such as "Totals" now appear at the top of the column instead of the bottom as traditionally presented. Ach!  And, we can no longer print an accurate Balance Sheet from a prior period (excuse my that no longer exists) it is now Net Worth in a different format.  Why because the genius who designed it did not provide for preserving the Portfolio Accounts values from prior periods.  Also, why the colors?  These are, first of all, redundant as the red numbers also show a (-) sign and secondly, they love to drink up ink cartridges (Was there a side deal with HP?)  

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.

I understand the wish to start over but for the user that is a negligent move.  Personally, I worked to set up a way of bookkeeping and reporting under the old system (2007) that was functioning well.  Yes, there were new things I would have liked but to throw in the trash everything good because you do not wish to deal with it?  Do you understand our distress?  I am a MAC user.  A small LLC business that has different needs from a corporation.  I'm not a tax accountant.  After the upgrade I had to assign tax form numbers.  Not that it isn't helpful for some but I'm not even allowed to choose not to.  I can't run my reports the way I want (as you've heard from many). You had a system that was beneficial to small business and now I want to go backwards.  At the end of the year I am considering the move of finalizing this program and opening a new one in my old program.  The sad thing is, you won't be giving the security or other updates that I will probably need at some point.  At that point I will probably look elsewhere for something that will work for me.  After all these years using Quicken (since 90's) I hope I don't have to but you are going to have to make this work for me again. I realize you personally aren't the person working on the Quicken team.  You do seem to know a lot about them not to be involved at all however. If you can pass on this information to those who do make the decisions, maybe they should made aware if they want to grow their business. 

jacobs

Alan said:

Having developed a software system for my retail business in the early 1980s, I can appreciate the difficulty in design, development and testing.  However, what I cannot fathom is that Quicken 2007 from a user functioning point of view was very good.  It provided all of the necessary elements to an effective accounting system that was user friendly.  It would seem the better approach would have been NOT to reinvent the wheel but to simply make the existing very satisfactory program work on a new platform etc. without giving up any features.   Version 2018 is so foreign to 2007 that is frustrating.  Simple things such as "Totals" now appear at the top of the column instead of the bottom as traditionally presented. Ach!  And, we can no longer print an accurate Balance Sheet from a prior period (excuse my that no longer exists) it is now Net Worth in a different format.  Why because the genius who designed it did not provide for preserving the Portfolio Accounts values from prior periods.  Also, why the colors?  These are, first of all, redundant as the red numbers also show a (-) sign and secondly, they love to drink up ink cartridges (Was there a side deal with HP?)  

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.

Debbie, I'm just a fellow Quicken user, so don't shoot the messenger, but I'd like to explain some things I think you might not understand about the change in Quicken Mac. I hope some of this long-winded post help you understand why change for Quicken Mac was inevitable and needed.

There was no desire to start over to build a new Quicken for Mac. There was a necessity to start over. If you've been a Mac user since ye olden days, you know that there was a pretty radical transformation of the Mac operating system in the change from the classic Mac OS (which terminated with Mac OS 9). Mac OS X in 2001 was a complete rebuild of the Mac operating system from the ground up, but Apple did a masterful job building compatibility with the older system so older applications could continue to run. Several years into the transition, Apple began telling developers that pieces of the old system would cease to be supported in the future, and some developers like Quicken faced the reality that they wouldn't be able to continue to make incremental updates to keep their programs running.

Just to give you one, non-technical example: Quicken 2007 and its predecessors create everything you see on the screen using a technology called QuickDraw, which dates back to the original Mac in 1984. It provides a way for a developer to say "draw a box here, a line there, put this text over there, etc." and control everything about the look of the screen, from fonts to colors to lines and images. In Mac OS X, screen imaging was completely re-engineered using a new graphics layer of code called Quartz, which handled fonts and drawing to the screen very differently. Quicken 2007 uses the old QuickDraw -- which Apple has remarkably kept working all this time, but which will finally no longer work in next year's macOS upgrade. For a program like Quicken, that means every screen and every report, has to be re-created using the newer underlying technologies.

And that's just one area of the program. The core database used in Quicken 2007 was custom-designed and has a number of known problems and limits. Mac OS X has a built-in modern, industry-standard database, which is faster, more robust, supports larger files and is rock-solid reliable -- but that means Quicken needed to re-program everything that is stored in and accessed from the database. The underlying way data is stored in memory in macOS X is different than the classic Mac OS, and it allows larger amounts of RAM, huge hard drives and fewer program crashes due to memory corruption. Networking to access the Internet is handled in Mac OS X is radically differently than the old Mac OS. These technology changes add up to an inescapable fact: Quicken's 1980s code base was going to have to be re-written to work on the Mac OS of the future.

When former owner Intuit began that project in 2006, no one expected Quicken 2007 would be able to be kept running for more than a decade; a combination of the good programming in Quicken, Apple moving more slowly than expected on retiring parts of the old operating system, some emergency tweaks and rather miraculous updates by Quicken engineers earlier this decade -- and just some old fashioned dumb luck -- have enabled us users to still be using Quicken 2007 on the latest macOS Mojave. But the key point is that it's been apparent for more than a decade that the day would come when the old code base would hit an impenetrable wall -- and Quicken needed to create something that would work when the old one no longer did. You said the change to the new Quicken is "negligent," but I would argue that if they hadn't developed a modern version of Quicken Mac for today and the decades ahead, that would have been negligent.  You -- and all of us who have been still using Quicken 2007 -- have had the benefit of using this program for 13 years. That is a lifetime (or beyond) in the software world. I doubt there is other software you're using today which is virtually untouched from 13 years ago. (You mentioned security updates; you should be aware that Quicken 2007 is a discontinued product, and hasn't been getting any security upgrades for years.)

Yes, change can be painful and disruptive. In this case, Quicken 2019 has a number of things which are better than Quicken 2007, but also is missing some important features and functionality of Quicken 2007. The developers have been working over the past few years to re-code and build those desired older features into the modern Quicken Mac; they've made a lot of headway, but it's still very much a work in progress.

I believe the managers at Quicken understand very well that there's a portion of the Mac user base for which the current state of Quicken Mac doesn't measure up to needs and expectations. I believe they expected to be able to deliver more functionality in a shorter period of time, and are frustrated that there's still a lot of work to be done to make Quicken 2019 a fully viable successor to Quicken 2007. This isn't to say they because they're well-meaning, they get a pass -- but the reality is that they have only a certain number of programmers and can only deliver enhancements as quickly as they are able. The program is more complicated than many people give it credit for. I believe they do think they can narrow the feature gap considerably over the next year, so that by the time Quicken 2007 hits that impenetrable wall with the next macOS release, Quicken 2019 will be good enough for most longtime users.

Meanwhile, you do have other options. First, you can continue using Quicken 2007 for quite awhile into the future. You do not need to upgrade your Mac past whatever you're currently running, or past the current Mojave, just because Apple releases a new operating system next September -- Quicken 2007 will continue to run indefinitely on the operating systems it currently runs on. You might find some financial institutions no longer download transaction to Quicken 2007, but you can always enter transactions manually. That might buy you another year or two or three, to see how the new Quicken further matures. Or, of course, you can move to other personal finance software. Some people have been happy moving on to another product and never looked back, while other users have found that competing products don't measure up to all of Quicken's features; since we all use Quicken differently, your assessment for your needs will be different than mine for my needs, or someone else's for their needs. 

Unknown

Alan said:

Having developed a software system for my retail business in the early 1980s, I can appreciate the difficulty in design, development and testing.  However, what I cannot fathom is that Quicken 2007 from a user functioning point of view was very good.  It provided all of the necessary elements to an effective accounting system that was user friendly.  It would seem the better approach would have been NOT to reinvent the wheel but to simply make the existing very satisfactory program work on a new platform etc. without giving up any features.   Version 2018 is so foreign to 2007 that is frustrating.  Simple things such as "Totals" now appear at the top of the column instead of the bottom as traditionally presented. Ach!  And, we can no longer print an accurate Balance Sheet from a prior period (excuse my that no longer exists) it is now Net Worth in a different format.  Why because the genius who designed it did not provide for preserving the Portfolio Accounts values from prior periods.  Also, why the colors?  These are, first of all, redundant as the red numbers also show a (-) sign and secondly, they love to drink up ink cartridges (Was there a side deal with HP?)  

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.

Can you tell me what is the latest Mac OS that will run 2007?

Unknown

Alan said:

Having developed a software system for my retail business in the early 1980s, I can appreciate the difficulty in design, development and testing.  However, what I cannot fathom is that Quicken 2007 from a user functioning point of view was very good.  It provided all of the necessary elements to an effective accounting system that was user friendly.  It would seem the better approach would have been NOT to reinvent the wheel but to simply make the existing very satisfactory program work on a new platform etc. without giving up any features.   Version 2018 is so foreign to 2007 that is frustrating.  Simple things such as "Totals" now appear at the top of the column instead of the bottom as traditionally presented. Ach!  And, we can no longer print an accurate Balance Sheet from a prior period (excuse my that no longer exists) it is now Net Worth in a different format.  Why because the genius who designed it did not provide for preserving the Portfolio Accounts values from prior periods.  Also, why the colors?  These are, first of all, redundant as the red numbers also show a (-) sign and secondly, they love to drink up ink cartridges (Was there a side deal with HP?)  

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.

Thank you!  It's sinking in.  Being a Mac user, I don't have to program or deal with technical issues so I did not understand that the technical/operational side is separate from the programing of what it can accomplish.  The world is moving a little fast for me.  I still do not trust the internet linking of my business to bank.  Most of that is not trusting in the security of my small town broadband.  I still do everything hands on.  That's a whole other topic you could probably explain! You are a gifted teacher.  Since you can't see your students response I will tell you that my eyes lit up, I smiled and thought, "Wow!  So that's how that works." (the lights came on- so to speak)

smayer97

Alan said:

Having developed a software system for my retail business in the early 1980s, I can appreciate the difficulty in design, development and testing.  However, what I cannot fathom is that Quicken 2007 from a user functioning point of view was very good.  It provided all of the necessary elements to an effective accounting system that was user friendly.  It would seem the better approach would have been NOT to reinvent the wheel but to simply make the existing very satisfactory program work on a new platform etc. without giving up any features.   Version 2018 is so foreign to 2007 that is frustrating.  Simple things such as "Totals" now appear at the top of the column instead of the bottom as traditionally presented. Ach!  And, we can no longer print an accurate Balance Sheet from a prior period (excuse my that no longer exists) it is now Net Worth in a different format.  Why because the genius who designed it did not provide for preserving the Portfolio Accounts values from prior periods.  Also, why the colors?  These are, first of all, redundant as the red numbers also show a (-) sign and secondly, they love to drink up ink cartridges (Was there a side deal with HP?)  

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.

Can we please stop having these off topic conversations in the IDEA threads? Please start your questions in a NEW thread or if you see an off topic reply, please wait until it is split off into a new thread before continuing the discussion. 

Otherwise, this just detracts from the purpose of the IDEA thread.

Thanks for understanding.

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smayer97

Implemented in v5.10 (Jan. 2019).

Stephen Fisher

Hey, for reporting It's worse than the 1980s DOS versions.

The only single way that I can find to see the value of something is by account totals. I can't figure how to get more granular. I added Tags to years of transactions (at great expense of time), so that I could select, say preferred shares or foreign shares but the only menu item that gives Values, rather than Transactions is Net Worth, and there the Tags are greyed out, so you can only get the total value of an account, nothing less.

And the entry above where the user says a Balance sheet is Net Worth on a given day - that is not exactly correct.  It is always the current period PLUS the last period, sometimes even quarters.