Quicken for Mac 2016 Release 3.5.1 Discussion

Unknown · August 2016

Are we ever going to get loan amortization? Quicken now downloads the information from my bank, but treats all payments (interest, principal and escrow) as if they are payments against principal. This is a feature that has worked fine in Q4Win for well over a decade. Is it that hard to implement?

Marys · August 2016

First of all I want to say how much I like Quicken Mac 2016. I've used Quicken (Windows) since 1999. I finally gave up on Quicken last Nov because I was spending hours and hours troubleshooting and working through glitches and bugs on such a regular basis that I decided to move on to other software. Then after reading last spring that Quicken was sold and there were lots of plans to get Quicken back up to par, I purchased the Mac version. Thank you! It is great.

I want to report an issue I'm having since the recent version release after downloading from WF Bank with matched transactions. If a transaction is automatically matched, it shows up as matched with the blue pencil but is also adding a new downloaded transaction (blue dot) for the same transaction. The Show Inspector for both transactions shows the same transaction from my bank, one says Matched (auto) and the other says downloaded. I've seen this twice now. It's easy to fix. I just delete the duplicate downloaded transaction, but it must be a bug, and I wanted to report it.

Thanks

Unknown · August 2016

Carmine Greco said:
Upgraded to 3.5.1 tonight and I'm trying to use the new Reconcile feature for the first time. Uncleared transactions from my register do not appear in the Reconcile window. I've looked at every option on the Reconcile window and cannot figure out why the one and only transaction (my monthly payment) is not showing up. This version seems like it needs a patch already.

I was trying to reconcile a credit card account, which automatically downloads transactions into Quicken. The only activity on the card is the monthly payment I make on the balance so there is just one transaction to reconcile. With the credit card account selected and the one transaction to reconcile having the Clr checkbox unchecked I:

1. Clicked the "Reconcile" button at the bottom of the Quicken window
2. Selected "Use Statement Balance" option
3. Entered the correct values for balance, ending date, and ending balance
a. The one transaction to reconcile has a date of 7/22/16 and the ending date is 8/3/16
b. The one transaction to reconcile is a transfer from my checking account
c. There are no transactions showing in the blued-out area of the Reconcile window
4. Clicked Next
5. No transactions show in the Reconcile window so there's nothing I can do from here.
a. I tried resizing the window, no transactions appear
b. I tried clicking both the "Cleared" and "Uncleared" buttons, no transactions appear, and the "Difference" to reconcile does not change either.

After all this, I was able to reconcile a credit card account from a different company. Then I went back to the original account, tried everything again, and this time the transaction appeared after step 3.

I'll report back if I see any other issues.

pauldv172 · August 2016

RickO said:
Is the issue with the inability to clear transaction flags (orange pencil, blue envelop) fixed in this release? I sure hope so, but nothing mentioned in the release notes about it.

How does a problem get fixed. I have a ton of blue envelopes still showing that I cannot remove. It happens with Wells Fargo and they are the simple pay a bill like Verizon.

bfrank · August 2016

Just wanted to say "Bravo" to the Quicken Mac Team for adding the ability to Reconcile using your Online Balance!

What a major timesaver!

Great work!

Quicken Marcus · August 2016

Roger_Houston! said:
Are we ever going to get loan amortization? Quicken now downloads the information from my bank, but treats all payments (interest, principal and escrow) as if they are payments against principal. This is a feature that has worked fine in Q4Win for well over a decade. Is it that hard to implement?

This is one of the top requested features from customers. Please vote at: https://www.quicken.com/mac/compare.

I can't comment on future features and when they might appear but it's definitely on our list of top things to add and a personal hot button for many of us here in the office. We just added 12-Month Budgets which was the top vote getter ahead of loans and we're working our way through the list. Thanks for letting us know this would be important to you.

Quicken Marcus · August 2016

Marys said:
First of all I want to say how much I like Quicken Mac 2016. I've used Quicken (Windows) since 1999. I finally gave up on Quicken last Nov because I was spending hours and hours troubleshooting and working through glitches and bugs on such a regular basis that I decided to move on to other software. Then after reading last spring that Quicken was sold and there were lots of plans to get Quicken back up to par, I purchased the Mac version. Thank you! It is great.

I want to report an issue I'm having since the recent version release after downloading from WF Bank with matched transactions. If a transaction is automatically matched, it shows up as matched with the blue pencil but is also adding a new downloaded transaction (blue dot) for the same transaction. The Show Inspector for both transactions shows the same transaction from my bank, one says Matched (auto) and the other says downloaded. I've seen this twice now. It's easy to fix. I just delete the duplicate downloaded transaction, but it must be a bug, and I wanted to report it.

Thanks

Marys, thanks for your nice comments. We appreciate it. I'll contact you directly to see if we can get to the bottom of the issue you're seeing. We had some weird matching issues that we recently fixed but there's always a possibility that what fixes an issue for one person actually causes an issue for another.

Quicken Marcus · August 2016

bfrank said:
Just wanted to say "Bravo" to the Quicken Mac Team for adding the ability to Reconcile using your Online Balance!

What a major timesaver!

Great work!

Thank you for the nice comment.

There's going to be some transition pains for some moving to the new reconcile feature but I think it is a lot more accurate than before and will work better for most going forward. Some of the issues people are reporting we believe are problems that have always been in their account but are now being surfaced because the new reconcile exposes these issues.

Unknown · August 2016

I installed the Mac 3.5.1 update this morning. Now I can't pay a credit card bill with Direct Connect. This worked fine before: I would select the correct payee and then set the transaction up as a transfer. It would pay the bill via Direct Connect, and enter it in my Quicken registers as a transfer from the Direct Connect checking account to the credit card account. Since the update, Quicken tells me it can't do a transfer because the credit card and checking accounts are not with the same institution (they're not). It does this even if I leave the Transfer field blank in the transaction.
Edit: Of course I am using the Online Payment tab.
Edit2: When I look at previous Direct Connect bill payments from these registers, the Transfer To field contains both the payee name and the transfer account name, one printed over the other (unreadable).
Edit3: What I called the Transfer To field in Edit2 is not labeled as such in those old transactions, as it is when I attempt a new one. Quicken seems to be combining the Payee and Transfer (To/From) fields in those past transactions since the update.
Edit4: Ah! When I looked at the checking account's settings, it said "Bill Pay: Not Available" (Intra-bank Funds Transfer was On). I clicked (I think) "Check for Bill Pay," and the dot next to Bill Pay changed from red to green. Seems to work now. The overprinting of payee and transfer account in older transactions also has gone away. You might want to investigate why the update disabled Direct Connect Bill Pay. Also, the Save button was greyed out when I edited the checking account's settings, so I had no choice other than Cancel, but luckily the change took effect anyway.

Quicken Jeff · August 2016

Lizzy Lou said:
I absolutely LOVE what you've done with the Budget function. SO much easier and intuitive, it finally makes sense for me to invest the time to do some real budgeting! One issue I've come up with, though, is how to exclude an account from the Actuals. I have an HSA (Health Savings Account) that I wanted to exclude from the Budget Actuals, and I finally figured out that if I go to the account settings and check the box to "hide" it from reports, it removed this account from the Budget Actuals as well as other reports - easy! However, when I try to exclude my Mortgage (Loan) account in this same manner, it does remove the Mortgage account from other reports, but it still shows up in my Budget Actuals. How do I remove my Mortgage account from the Budget Actuals? (It's really annoying, because it shows all my mortgage actuals to be zero (0), because the debit from my checking account is cancelled out by the credit on my mortgage account.) Thanks!

Roger, Click the "Budget" item in left Left Sidebar to get started.

Does this work for you?

Quicken Jeff · August 2016

RickO said:
Is the issue with the inability to clear transaction flags (orange pencil, blue envelop) fixed in this release? I sure hope so, but nothing mentioned in the release notes about it.

I'm sorry to say this issue is still present. This is something we wish to address in a future release.

Apologies,
Jeff

Unknown · August 2016

Carmine Greco said:
Upgraded to 3.5.1 tonight and I'm trying to use the new Reconcile feature for the first time. Uncleared transactions from my register do not appear in the Reconcile window. I've looked at every option on the Reconcile window and cannot figure out why the one and only transaction (my monthly payment) is not showing up. This version seems like it needs a patch already.

I have discovered a bug in the new reconcile by statement process. When you enter the end statement date make sure you use a 4 digit format. Entering 16 instead of 2016 will result in no transactions listed. Normally quicken allows the two digit format but then it automatically changes this to the 4 digit format. This one field does not do this.

Unknown · August 2016

Lizzy Lou said:
I absolutely LOVE what you've done with the Budget function. SO much easier and intuitive, it finally makes sense for me to invest the time to do some real budgeting! One issue I've come up with, though, is how to exclude an account from the Actuals. I have an HSA (Health Savings Account) that I wanted to exclude from the Budget Actuals, and I finally figured out that if I go to the account settings and check the box to "hide" it from reports, it removed this account from the Budget Actuals as well as other reports - easy! However, when I try to exclude my Mortgage (Loan) account in this same manner, it does remove the Mortgage account from other reports, but it still shows up in my Budget Actuals. How do I remove my Mortgage account from the Budget Actuals? (It's really annoying, because it shows all my mortgage actuals to be zero (0), because the debit from my checking account is cancelled out by the credit on my mortgage account.) Thanks!

Please allow account filters as an option in the budget. I have children accounts mixed along with my accounts and I don't want their activity in my personal budget report. The budget for the mobile device shows all accounts regardless of the 'hide in reports' setting for certain accounts.

Quicken Jeff · August 2016

Carmine Greco said:
Upgraded to 3.5.1 tonight and I'm trying to use the new Reconcile feature for the first time. Uncleared transactions from my register do not appear in the Reconcile window. I've looked at every option on the Reconcile window and cannot figure out why the one and only transaction (my monthly payment) is not showing up. This version seems like it needs a patch already.

Doug, I see that! Thanks so much for reporting. I will report to our dev team.

Unknown · August 2016

bfrank said:
Just wanted to say "Bravo" to the Quicken Mac Team for adding the ability to Reconcile using your Online Balance!

What a major timesaver!

Great work!

I totally agree that the reconciliation process is MUCH IMPROVED, and super easy to use. Thank you!

Unknown · August 2016

The reconcile has some issues with investment accounts. I did the following.

Reconciled using a statement method set the beginning balance to the same and set the date to the last time I reconciled in the previous version. No transactions were listed indicating that I truly was reconciled.
I add a remove shares transaction for fees. I check the portfolio and all looks good.
I add a reinvest dividend transaction. Now when I check the portfolio with this fund expanded, I have a new line before the earliest date with a date of "Add Cost Basis". The number of shares is equal to the sum of the remove shares and reinvest dividend. (Difference actually since one is negative.) This is a bug. I just entered these shares and their cost basis. Well actually, you can not enter any longer the cost basis for fees like this.
If I click on the 'Add Cost Basis' and choose to add a sell transaction. I select an approximate dollar amount and of course the # of shares is already filled in by Quicken. I can get the portfolio back to normal (no add cost basis line), but the number of shares are now wrong because of this transaction undoes the two previous transactions.
I try to correct this by doing a buy of the exact opposite of the sell, but the Add Cost Basis reappears.
I delete the buy from step 5. And the portfolio is once again good.
I do a reconcile and pretend it is correct though it is not. I enter the current account balance and the end date as before. All three transactions show up and I mark them as cleared.
So now I have to fix my messed up account repeating step 5. And was again I have the dreaded Add Cost Basis show up in the Portfolio window.
I repeat step 6. And log this report.

This is not the first time today that this has happened. Usually doing the extra buy would fix things, but not in this account. This actually came up as an issue in all of my Investment accounts. I will leave this broken so that I can try peoples suggestions.

Quicken Jeff · August 2016

George Shirk said:
I downloaded and installed Quicken for Mac v 3.5.1. Then I began to reconcile my checking account, The process using prior versions was quite straight forward. I have being using Quicken/Intuit for nearly twenty years and have had no difficulty reconciling my accounts. I did so on July 1, 2016. Using the current version on August 3, 2016, Quicken shows a discrepancy of $ 2271.95. It also shows the my Quicken balance is nearly $400 higher than the checking account shows it to be.

If nothing else works, I will go into TimeMachine and reinstall the last version, and pray that I will never need to install any newer version. Obviously I need help. I would like to point out that I am very comfortable with mathematics, having earned three degrees in that field.

Two questions. Did any of the software developers actually use the software? Has anyone there heard of the saying "If it ain't busted, don't fix it"?

George B. Shirk
[Edited Personal Info]

smayer97, could you say more about Re-reconcile? Specifically why you'd do it and how you would have done it before?

I ask because even prior to 3.5.1 the Starting date had no impact on the calculations or even the transactions that could be included in the calculation. It just set the divider line in the UI (but you could still select transactions outside of the date range.)

Let me know an example. Thanks!

M C Crockett · August 2016

Doug Hiser said:
The reconcile has some issues with investment accounts. I did the following.
Reconciled using a statement method set the beginning balance to the same and set the date to the last time I reconciled in the previous version. No transactions were listed indicating that I truly was reconciled.
I add a remove shares transaction for fees. I check the portfolio and all looks good.
I add a reinvest dividend transaction. Now when I check the portfolio with this fund expanded, I have a new line before the earliest date with a date of "Add Cost Basis". The number of shares is equal to the sum of the remove shares and reinvest dividend. (Difference actually since one is negative.) This is a bug. I just entered these shares and their cost basis. Well actually, you can not enter any longer the cost basis for fees like this.
If I click on the 'Add Cost Basis' and choose to add a sell transaction. I select an approximate dollar amount and of course the # of shares is already filled in by Quicken. I can get the portfolio back to normal (no add cost basis line), but the number of shares are now wrong because of this transaction undoes the two previous transactions.
I try to correct this by doing a buy of the exact opposite of the sell, but the Add Cost Basis reappears.
I delete the buy from step 5. And the portfolio is once again good.
I do a reconcile and pretend it is correct though it is not. I enter the current account balance and the end date as before. All three transactions show up and I mark them as cleared.
So now I have to fix my messed up account repeating step 5. And was again I have the dreaded Add Cost Basis show up in the Portfolio window.
I repeat step 6. And log this report.
This is not the first time today that this has happened. Usually doing the extra buy would fix things, but not in this account. This actually came up as an issue in all of my Investment accounts. I will leave this broken so that I can try peoples suggestions.

Doug Hiser: The problem that you attribute to Reconcile seems to me to be more of a problem with entering transactions correctly and, to an extent, a misunderstanding of the reconciliation process.

The first problem that I noticed is that you are removing shares to pay fees but this produces no income to pay the fees that you incurred. You have to sell the shares to produce the income to pay the fees.

Somewhere in your statement, there should be two transactions. One to indicate the fees incurred during the current statement period. Another to indicate the number of shares that were sold to pay the fees. If the cash balance in your account is unchanged after the two transactions. The fee charged is the total cost of the shares sold.

Somewhere in your statement, there should be some indication of the dividend that you earned and the number of shares that were bought with that dividend. The dividend is the total cost of the purchased shares.

When you Reconcile an investment account, you are reconciling the cash balance in the account and not the balances of any shares held in the account.

If you display the "Share" and "Share Balance" columns in your transaction register, it is very easy to compare your Quicken holdings to those reported by your financial institution.

Quicken creates Placeholder entries whenever you fail to enter a cost for a sale or purchase of shares and to adjust your shares to match those reported in the <INVPOS> section of the OFX/QFX file downloaded from your financial institution.

M C Crockett · August 2016

Doug Hiser said:
The reconcile has some issues with investment accounts. I did the following.
Reconciled using a statement method set the beginning balance to the same and set the date to the last time I reconciled in the previous version. No transactions were listed indicating that I truly was reconciled.
I add a remove shares transaction for fees. I check the portfolio and all looks good.
I add a reinvest dividend transaction. Now when I check the portfolio with this fund expanded, I have a new line before the earliest date with a date of "Add Cost Basis". The number of shares is equal to the sum of the remove shares and reinvest dividend. (Difference actually since one is negative.) This is a bug. I just entered these shares and their cost basis. Well actually, you can not enter any longer the cost basis for fees like this.
If I click on the 'Add Cost Basis' and choose to add a sell transaction. I select an approximate dollar amount and of course the # of shares is already filled in by Quicken. I can get the portfolio back to normal (no add cost basis line), but the number of shares are now wrong because of this transaction undoes the two previous transactions.
I try to correct this by doing a buy of the exact opposite of the sell, but the Add Cost Basis reappears.
I delete the buy from step 5. And the portfolio is once again good.
I do a reconcile and pretend it is correct though it is not. I enter the current account balance and the end date as before. All three transactions show up and I mark them as cleared.
So now I have to fix my messed up account repeating step 5. And was again I have the dreaded Add Cost Basis show up in the Portfolio window.
I repeat step 6. And log this report.
This is not the first time today that this has happened. Usually doing the extra buy would fix things, but not in this account. This actually came up as an issue in all of my Investment accounts. I will leave this broken so that I can try peoples suggestions.

Doug Hiser: The problem that you attribute to Reconcile seems to me to be more of a problem with entering transactions correctly and, to an extent, a misunderstanding of the reconciliation process.

The first problem that I noticed is that you are removing shares to pay fees but this produces no income to pay the fees that you incurred. You have to sell the shares to produce the income to pay the fees.

Somewhere in your statement, there should be two transactions. One to indicate the fees incurred during the current statement period. Another to indicate the number of shares that were sold to pay the fees. If the cash balance in your account is unchanged after the two transactions. The fee charged is the total cost of the shares sold.

Somewhere in your statement, there should be some indication of the dividend that you earned and the number of shares that were bought with that dividend. The dividend is the total cost of the purchased shares.

When you Reconcile an investment account, you are reconciling the cash balance in the account and not the balances of any shares held in the account.

If you display the "Share" and "Share Balance" columns in your transaction register, it is very easy to compare your Quicken holdings to those reported by your financial institution.

Quicken creates Placeholder entries whenever you fail to enter a cost for a sale or purchase of shares and to adjust your shares to match those reported in the <INVPOS> section of the OFX/QFX file downloaded from your financial institution.

Unknown · August 2016

Doug Hiser said:
The reconcile has some issues with investment accounts. I did the following.
Reconciled using a statement method set the beginning balance to the same and set the date to the last time I reconciled in the previous version. No transactions were listed indicating that I truly was reconciled.
I add a remove shares transaction for fees. I check the portfolio and all looks good.
I add a reinvest dividend transaction. Now when I check the portfolio with this fund expanded, I have a new line before the earliest date with a date of "Add Cost Basis". The number of shares is equal to the sum of the remove shares and reinvest dividend. (Difference actually since one is negative.) This is a bug. I just entered these shares and their cost basis. Well actually, you can not enter any longer the cost basis for fees like this.
If I click on the 'Add Cost Basis' and choose to add a sell transaction. I select an approximate dollar amount and of course the # of shares is already filled in by Quicken. I can get the portfolio back to normal (no add cost basis line), but the number of shares are now wrong because of this transaction undoes the two previous transactions.
I try to correct this by doing a buy of the exact opposite of the sell, but the Add Cost Basis reappears.
I delete the buy from step 5. And the portfolio is once again good.
I do a reconcile and pretend it is correct though it is not. I enter the current account balance and the end date as before. All three transactions show up and I mark them as cleared.
So now I have to fix my messed up account repeating step 5. And was again I have the dreaded Add Cost Basis show up in the Portfolio window.
I repeat step 6. And log this report.
This is not the first time today that this has happened. Usually doing the extra buy would fix things, but not in this account. This actually came up as an issue in all of my Investment accounts. I will leave this broken so that I can try peoples suggestions.

One thing at a time:

(1) Yes the remove shares is rather weird, but these were translated from Quicken 2007 from move shares which had a unit price to remove shares which does not. So all my share prices were lost in the upgrade. I was not about to go reenter all of that information for two decades in a 401k account where there is no capital gains. I upgraded from 2007 just 9 months ago, and I did not have a problem reconciling until this update. I would be glad to change my data entry techniques on fees if that fixed the problem. The cash in my 401k always stays at $0. I just try this and the problem persists. I hope you noticed that it was always the second operation that caused the problem, not the removed shared.

(2) I assure you that when I complete the reinvest dividend that I enter the total price and the number of shares. It computes the share price. There is no missing information and the cost basis is completely known.

(3) Yes I know that reconcile only deals with the cash amount in the account. I have a procedure I follow to reconcile. I enter the share price at the end date of the statement by doing a buy and then deleting it. I lost this feature when I upgraded. I then set the portfolio to the end date and compare the total value of the account. If it is to the penny, then I consider the account reconciled and I perform the reconcile in quicken so that it records these transactions as being good. I know that Quicken is clueless on Investment accounts.

Thank you for your thoughtful suggestions. We need to eliminate operator error, since I assumed that I was not the problem because the only thing that changed was the version of Quicken, but as you pointed out my protocol might not be the intended protocol.

Unknown · August 2016

Doug Hiser said:
The reconcile has some issues with investment accounts. I did the following.
Reconciled using a statement method set the beginning balance to the same and set the date to the last time I reconciled in the previous version. No transactions were listed indicating that I truly was reconciled.
I add a remove shares transaction for fees. I check the portfolio and all looks good.
I add a reinvest dividend transaction. Now when I check the portfolio with this fund expanded, I have a new line before the earliest date with a date of "Add Cost Basis". The number of shares is equal to the sum of the remove shares and reinvest dividend. (Difference actually since one is negative.) This is a bug. I just entered these shares and their cost basis. Well actually, you can not enter any longer the cost basis for fees like this.
If I click on the 'Add Cost Basis' and choose to add a sell transaction. I select an approximate dollar amount and of course the # of shares is already filled in by Quicken. I can get the portfolio back to normal (no add cost basis line), but the number of shares are now wrong because of this transaction undoes the two previous transactions.
I try to correct this by doing a buy of the exact opposite of the sell, but the Add Cost Basis reappears.
I delete the buy from step 5. And the portfolio is once again good.
I do a reconcile and pretend it is correct though it is not. I enter the current account balance and the end date as before. All three transactions show up and I mark them as cleared.
So now I have to fix my messed up account repeating step 5. And was again I have the dreaded Add Cost Basis show up in the Portfolio window.
I repeat step 6. And log this report.
This is not the first time today that this has happened. Usually doing the extra buy would fix things, but not in this account. This actually came up as an issue in all of my Investment accounts. I will leave this broken so that I can try peoples suggestions.

Hang on one thing I said is not correct. This is the first time I have entered anything in this account since I transitioned from Quicken 2007. I have been using Quicken during the last 9 months but I have not dealt with my retirement accounts, until now. So perhaps we are looking at an artifact from the transition.

Unknown · August 2016

Doug Hiser said:
The reconcile has some issues with investment accounts. I did the following.
Reconciled using a statement method set the beginning balance to the same and set the date to the last time I reconciled in the previous version. No transactions were listed indicating that I truly was reconciled.
I add a remove shares transaction for fees. I check the portfolio and all looks good.
I add a reinvest dividend transaction. Now when I check the portfolio with this fund expanded, I have a new line before the earliest date with a date of "Add Cost Basis". The number of shares is equal to the sum of the remove shares and reinvest dividend. (Difference actually since one is negative.) This is a bug. I just entered these shares and their cost basis. Well actually, you can not enter any longer the cost basis for fees like this.
If I click on the 'Add Cost Basis' and choose to add a sell transaction. I select an approximate dollar amount and of course the # of shares is already filled in by Quicken. I can get the portfolio back to normal (no add cost basis line), but the number of shares are now wrong because of this transaction undoes the two previous transactions.
I try to correct this by doing a buy of the exact opposite of the sell, but the Add Cost Basis reappears.
I delete the buy from step 5. And the portfolio is once again good.
I do a reconcile and pretend it is correct though it is not. I enter the current account balance and the end date as before. All three transactions show up and I mark them as cleared.
So now I have to fix my messed up account repeating step 5. And was again I have the dreaded Add Cost Basis show up in the Portfolio window.
I repeat step 6. And log this report.
This is not the first time today that this has happened. Usually doing the extra buy would fix things, but not in this account. This actually came up as an issue in all of my Investment accounts. I will leave this broken so that I can try peoples suggestions.

Sorry for one more post. I do not download QFX or the like, nor do I connect online in these old retirement accounts. They have very little activity so I just enter them manually. I have been translating my accounts over to the more modern approach—one by one, but this particular one is on my list to consolidate into another accounts.

Quicken Marcus · August 2016

rolandwalkenhors said:
I installed the Mac 3.5.1 update this morning. Now I can't pay a credit card bill with Direct Connect. This worked fine before: I would select the correct payee and then set the transaction up as a transfer. It would pay the bill via Direct Connect, and enter it in my Quicken registers as a transfer from the Direct Connect checking account to the credit card account. Since the update, Quicken tells me it can't do a transfer because the credit card and checking accounts are not with the same institution (they're not). It does this even if I leave the Transfer field blank in the transaction.
Edit: Of course I am using the Online Payment tab.
Edit2: When I look at previous Direct Connect bill payments from these registers, the Transfer To field contains both the payee name and the transfer account name, one printed over the other (unreadable).
Edit3: What I called the Transfer To field in Edit2 is not labeled as such in those old transactions, as it is when I attempt a new one. Quicken seems to be combining the Payee and Transfer (To/From) fields in those past transactions since the update.
Edit4: Ah! When I looked at the checking account's settings, it said "Bill Pay: Not Available" (Intra-bank Funds Transfer was On). I clicked (I think) "Check for Bill Pay," and the dot next to Bill Pay changed from red to green. Seems to work now. The overprinting of payee and transfer account in older transactions also has gone away. You might want to investigate why the update disabled Direct Connect Bill Pay. Also, the Save button was greyed out when I edited the checking account's settings, so I had no choice other than Cancel, but luckily the change took effect anyway.

Ugh. Thanks for reporting this issue and for doing an update. Has anyone else seen their Bill Pay get turned off with the update?

Unknown · August 2016

Charles said:
Don't know if this is the best forum for my problem, but here goes. Received two program updates(Quicken-7.qif, and -8.qif. When I attempt to install them I get "...Safari can't open the file because no available application can open it".
Second problem, all worked fine when first purchased a few days ago, now when I attempt to "Update all accounts online", I get the following: can't connect to (my banks name) because Safari can't connect to the server". Very odd, because I can connect using Safari outside of Quicken

Hello everyone!!! I have switch over from Windows to Mac about a year ago, every since then I have not been able to setup a Buget, Im looking for any help and willing to talk to someone other then Quicken support, I have put in close to 5 hours and NO one knows what to do to find a fix, HELPPPPPPPP

Unknown · August 2016

Charles said:
Don't know if this is the best forum for my problem, but here goes. Received two program updates(Quicken-7.qif, and -8.qif. When I attempt to install them I get "...Safari can't open the file because no available application can open it".
Second problem, all worked fine when first purchased a few days ago, now when I attempt to "Update all accounts online", I get the following: can't connect to (my banks name) because Safari can't connect to the server". Very odd, because I can connect using Safari outside of Quicken

Hello everyone!!! I have switch over from Windows to Mac about a year ago, every since then I have not been able to setup a Buget, Im looking for any help and willing to talk to someone other then Quicken support, I have put in close to 5 hours and NO one knows what to do to find a fix, HELPPPPPPPP

Unknown · August 2016

George Shirk said:
I downloaded and installed Quicken for Mac v 3.5.1. Then I began to reconcile my checking account, The process using prior versions was quite straight forward. I have being using Quicken/Intuit for nearly twenty years and have had no difficulty reconciling my accounts. I did so on July 1, 2016. Using the current version on August 3, 2016, Quicken shows a discrepancy of $ 2271.95. It also shows the my Quicken balance is nearly $400 higher than the checking account shows it to be.

If nothing else works, I will go into TimeMachine and reinstall the last version, and pray that I will never need to install any newer version. Obviously I need help. I would like to point out that I am very comfortable with mathematics, having earned three degrees in that field.

Two questions. Did any of the software developers actually use the software? Has anyone there heard of the saying "If it ain't busted, don't fix it"?

George B. Shirk
[Edited Personal Info]

Hello everyone!!! I was hoping that the new update Aug 2016 would fix the BUDGET. I have switch over from Windows to Mac about a year ago, every since then I have not been able to setup a Buget, Im looking for any help and willing to talk to someone other then Quicken support, I have put in close to 5 hours and NO one knows what to do to find a fix, HELPPPPPPPP

Mark

M C Crockett · August 2016

Doug Hiser said:
The reconcile has some issues with investment accounts. I did the following.
Reconciled using a statement method set the beginning balance to the same and set the date to the last time I reconciled in the previous version. No transactions were listed indicating that I truly was reconciled.
I add a remove shares transaction for fees. I check the portfolio and all looks good.
I add a reinvest dividend transaction. Now when I check the portfolio with this fund expanded, I have a new line before the earliest date with a date of "Add Cost Basis". The number of shares is equal to the sum of the remove shares and reinvest dividend. (Difference actually since one is negative.) This is a bug. I just entered these shares and their cost basis. Well actually, you can not enter any longer the cost basis for fees like this.
If I click on the 'Add Cost Basis' and choose to add a sell transaction. I select an approximate dollar amount and of course the # of shares is already filled in by Quicken. I can get the portfolio back to normal (no add cost basis line), but the number of shares are now wrong because of this transaction undoes the two previous transactions.
I try to correct this by doing a buy of the exact opposite of the sell, but the Add Cost Basis reappears.
I delete the buy from step 5. And the portfolio is once again good.
I do a reconcile and pretend it is correct though it is not. I enter the current account balance and the end date as before. All three transactions show up and I mark them as cleared.
So now I have to fix my messed up account repeating step 5. And was again I have the dreaded Add Cost Basis show up in the Portfolio window.
I repeat step 6. And log this report.
This is not the first time today that this has happened. Usually doing the extra buy would fix things, but not in this account. This actually came up as an issue in all of my Investment accounts. I will leave this broken so that I can try peoples suggestions.

Let's get one of the simpler issues out of the way first. You mentioned creating a buy transaction and then deleting it to set the NAV share price for the mutual fund. This is unnecessary. Click on "Window" in the menu bar and select "Securities" in the drop-down list. Find your mutual fund in the "Securities" window and double-click on the entry. Click on Price History in the drop-down pane that is displayed. Enter the date and set the NAV price in the Closing Price, High, and Low and click the Add button.

Perhaps that wasn't simpler but that's how you manually maintain the Price History for a mutual fund that is not publicly traded or is thinly traded.

Now, as you indicate that you don't want to re-enter years of activity, let's fix up the account for future use. Find the date of the last transaction where you know that the share balance is correct. Click on Reconcile. Click on "Use Statement Balance". Set the ending date to the date that you found plus one month. Click Next.

Now click on the cog wheel on the right side of the pane. Select "Start fresh..." in the drop down menu. This will mark all transactions as reconciled that occurred more than 49 days in the past. Now close the Reconcile window.

With the Clr column displayed, you can option-click the Clr column to mark your last known good transaction as Reconciled and each transaction before it that weren't marked Reconciled when "Start fresh..." was selected.

This is a bit hokey but the new Reconcile process doesn't allow you to specify a starting date and for some reason the new "Start fresh..." logic will not mark transactions as Reconciled that are less than 49 days old. This was much easier when you were able to set the starting date.

This should get you to the point where you can use Reconcile without problems as long as you remember to enter the management fee, sell shares to cover the management fee, and enter the reinvest dividend transaction.

smayer97 · August 2016

George Shirk said:
I downloaded and installed Quicken for Mac v 3.5.1. Then I began to reconcile my checking account, The process using prior versions was quite straight forward. I have being using Quicken/Intuit for nearly twenty years and have had no difficulty reconciling my accounts. I did so on July 1, 2016. Using the current version on August 3, 2016, Quicken shows a discrepancy of $ 2271.95. It also shows the my Quicken balance is nearly $400 higher than the checking account shows it to be.

If nothing else works, I will go into TimeMachine and reinstall the last version, and pray that I will never need to install any newer version. Obviously I need help. I would like to point out that I am very comfortable with mathematics, having earned three degrees in that field.

Two questions. Did any of the software developers actually use the software? Has anyone there heard of the saying "If it ain't busted, don't fix it"?

George B. Shirk
[Edited Personal Info]

@Quicken Jeff, I'm from the QM2007 world. So I am looking for functionality that exists in QM2007 before migrating.

Also context is I tend to reconcile to statements, not online balances, in general. Not sure if that makes any difference.

Use cases include when reconciling (just off the top of my head)
- errors that can occur such as wrong matches to downloaded transactions, so reconcile includes a transaction that was correctly matched (e.g. wrong payee), even though the amount matched
- forgot to include a some transactions, where the mix still reconciles based on balance but the wrong transactions were selected.
- entered wrong end date for reconciliation period and need to redo with correct one (sometimes periods are 3 months vs typical 1 month, and date was entered wrong on one of the reconciliation periods)
- re-reconcile statements out of order....(there are scenarios where that is sometimes warranted)...could be going back months back to redo a reconciliation because a discrepancy does not become apparent until much later...(this tends to happens more often with investment accounts, though not exclusively)

Also, new model assumes reconciliation is ALWAYS sequential...therefore cannot handle non-sequential scenarios, as pointed out above. There user is locked into ONE use case at the expense of not being able to easily deal with unforeseen circumstances.

I know that you can manually change/override the status of individual transactions, but then there is no verification process to confirm the changes balance correctly.

Cannot recall all situations, as they don't happen all the time (if they did, then there is a bigger underlying problem with the process less likely to be related to Quicken :-\ ).

Related to this is the desire/need to have reconciled statement/periods saved, like in QM2007 and QWin. Without the start date, that is less likely to be possible.

The way I do it now (in QM2007), I can open any old statement period, adjust statement date period if needed (start and or end date), then change (add, remove) transactions as needed, sometimes unreconciling ALL or large number of transactions (REALLY EASY to do in QM2007...simply click on one transaction, then drag cursor over as many transactions as desired, without letting go...all selected transactions become unreconciled) and redo the reconciliation to track down a discrepancy.

That said, though less frequent, when you need to re-reconcile, I am happy to be able to do it, by going back to past statements. I know I am not alone in this (other users have pointed this out in the past).

Bottom line, the reconcile process in QM2007 and QWin is a proven process that has worked extremely well for many decades, is quite flexible and versatile, and is able to address various needs to fix up data. It would make sense to replicate it mostly as is.

BTW, a related process is the transaction matching and acceptance process, that is strongly tied to the reconciliation process. There needs to be an acceptance process to minimize matching errors, provide user control over when downloaded transactions get applied to an account/register, and provide a confirmation step that matching is valid. The current process is presumptive and is far more error prone and contributes to challenges in the reconciliation process. There are numerous posts about these types of issues.

HTH

smayer97 · August 2016

George Shirk said:
I downloaded and installed Quicken for Mac v 3.5.1. Then I began to reconcile my checking account, The process using prior versions was quite straight forward. I have being using Quicken/Intuit for nearly twenty years and have had no difficulty reconciling my accounts. I did so on July 1, 2016. Using the current version on August 3, 2016, Quicken shows a discrepancy of $ 2271.95. It also shows the my Quicken balance is nearly $400 higher than the checking account shows it to be.

If nothing else works, I will go into TimeMachine and reinstall the last version, and pray that I will never need to install any newer version. Obviously I need help. I would like to point out that I am very comfortable with mathematics, having earned three degrees in that field.

Two questions. Did any of the software developers actually use the software? Has anyone there heard of the saying "If it ain't busted, don't fix it"?

George B. Shirk
[Edited Personal Info]

@Quicken Jeff...the discussion between Crockett and Hiser highlights another use case...

Another is statements that have gaps....if you have an account that has no activity for a while, no statements may be generated for a while. Then when there is activity, the start date is of a current period, not the date of the last statement that may be months (or years) past. This may be fastidious but it has its place for good record keeping (especially in light of tracking past reconciliation periods).

Bottom line, there are several use cases that warrant being able to specify start date.

Unknown · August 2016

Doug Hiser said:
The reconcile has some issues with investment accounts. I did the following.
Reconciled using a statement method set the beginning balance to the same and set the date to the last time I reconciled in the previous version. No transactions were listed indicating that I truly was reconciled.
I add a remove shares transaction for fees. I check the portfolio and all looks good.
I add a reinvest dividend transaction. Now when I check the portfolio with this fund expanded, I have a new line before the earliest date with a date of "Add Cost Basis". The number of shares is equal to the sum of the remove shares and reinvest dividend. (Difference actually since one is negative.) This is a bug. I just entered these shares and their cost basis. Well actually, you can not enter any longer the cost basis for fees like this.
If I click on the 'Add Cost Basis' and choose to add a sell transaction. I select an approximate dollar amount and of course the # of shares is already filled in by Quicken. I can get the portfolio back to normal (no add cost basis line), but the number of shares are now wrong because of this transaction undoes the two previous transactions.
I try to correct this by doing a buy of the exact opposite of the sell, but the Add Cost Basis reappears.
I delete the buy from step 5. And the portfolio is once again good.
I do a reconcile and pretend it is correct though it is not. I enter the current account balance and the end date as before. All three transactions show up and I mark them as cleared.
So now I have to fix my messed up account repeating step 5. And was again I have the dreaded Add Cost Basis show up in the Portfolio window.
I repeat step 6. And log this report.
This is not the first time today that this has happened. Usually doing the extra buy would fix things, but not in this account. This actually came up as an issue in all of my Investment accounts. I will leave this broken so that I can try peoples suggestions.

I found the Price History. In 2007, you just enter it in the portfolio window. Thanks.

I did the fresh start, and I only had to mark clear two statements for the last fees I did. I then added my Reinvest Dividend and once again the Portfolio shows this needing me to add the cost basis, which is there. The weird part is that the number of shares not only includes the RD but also the fees that was entered by your method and prior reconciled. The fees did not produce a cost basis, but it is included there now.

So I break the RD into a Dividend Income and a Buy and it does the same thing. The problem with this is that the new line in the Portfolio really throws the total off. The reconcile was a rabbit I guess.

Thanks for the help and having a teaching heart. Any more ideas?

Quicken for Mac 2016 Release 3.5.1 Discussion

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