QMac: comparison reports needed (41 Legacy Votes)

Quicken Community

I have been using Quicken for Mac since 1990. I was very disappointed when I started using Quicken for Mac 2016 and found that there was no comparison report! So I am back using Quicken for Mac 2007. Will comparison reports return in 2017? I would love to upgrade if so. Thanks.

smayer97

No one can answer that here. Since your post is really a request for a report in the current version, I have asked the mods to change this thread to an IDEA. This way others can vote on it which is support to raise visibility to the developers.

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smayer97

BTW, You may also want to add your VOTE to MANY types of reports and report features, here: https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/list-of-requests-for-report-types-and-related-fe...

Click the link above to go take a look at the list and vote for the ones you want to see implemented in Quicken for Mac. 

Be sure to scroll down the page, as some contain lists of related features.  Click on the link to EACH IDEA separately. Then you click the VOTE button at the top of EACH page that opens up respectively to increase the count and therefore its visibility to the developers

If you do not click VOTE at the top of the page of each feature, your vote will NOT be counted for THAT feature!

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smayer97

It turns out that this type of report is simply a subset or application of a Columnar report, which adds an extra column for each comparative period, and columns showing the calculation of the differences, as described here.

To make sure your vote from here gets counted in, you can add your VOTE for the  Columnar report.

You also want to add your vote to each of the components that make up the essential related report features described here.

First, click on each underlined link above to go there, then click VOTE at the top of THAT page, so your will vote count for THAT feature and increase its visibility to the developers.

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jacobs

Comparison reports were one of the new features added when Quicken 2017 launched, and the functionality to drill down on line items in a comparison report was added in the first update to Quicken 2017. It's not necessary to vote for this as a future enhancement because the functionality exists, unless there's something specific you'r looking for that the current implementation does not offer.

M C Crockett

There is one significant flaw in the "drill down" feature that was added to the Category Comparison report.  The tailored Category Summary report that is displayed in the pop-up window does not always display the details due to differences in transaction selection logic.

For example, the Category Comparison report will report as Income the IRA distributions that I took in 2015 and 2016.  When I click on the amount in either year, the pop-up Category Summary report displays no transactions and reports $0.00 in the Money In and Money Out sections.

The Category Comparison report excludes all retirement accounts when selecting the transactions to display.  To "drill down" it passes the Category Summary report the accounts and category to use in generating the report.  If the Transfer field contains an account that is not included in the list of accounts to examine, the transaction is not included in the Category Summary report that is displayed.

The transaction selection logic used in the Category Comparison report needs to replace the current transaction selection logic in the Category Summary report.  In addition, this transaction selection logic should replace the existing transaction selection logic in the Budget tool.

smayer97

Yes, and that is one of the motivations for a unified interface that is addressed in the description above (described here). The current interface(s) is hap-hazard and inconsistent, making results somewhat unpredictable. 

Unknown

I can't believe I can't create a comparison report! I need to compare how much I spent last year to this year. As far as I can tell this can not be done with Q17 for Mac!

jacobs

Mimi, you absolutely CAN create a comparison report. This is on of the significant improvements in the 2017 version.

But they're just a little hard to find if you don't know where to look. Go to Reports > New Report (in the menu, or on the main blue navigation bar). You'll see that you now have a choice of creating a Comparison, Summary or Transaction report. Select Comparison. Give your report a name. Then select whether you want the report by Category, by Payee or by Tag, and click Create Report. If you select Category, for example, it will default to a comparison of your income and expenses for the current year-to-date compared to the same time period last year. For a different date range,click the Customize icon in the gray tool bar at the top of the report, and tweak the settings; in addition to setting the date ranges, you can choose selected accounts, categories, tags or payees.

Unknown

Thank you! That was so easy once I realized that it allowed me to compare after creating the report!  It's not very user friendly but glad I was able to get it to work!

jacobs

The developers seem to be stuck about halfway between the "old" reports -- the ones you see named in the Reports menu -- which mostly came over from the old Quicken Essentials program, and the "new" reports -- the ones all hidden, strangely, behind "New Report" in the menu -- which show a new user interface that offers some additional flexibility (like adjustable column widths, ability to sort by column).

Hopefully they will unify the user interface, replacing all the "old" reports, and continue to add more user controls (the ability to show/hide columns, put subtotals on the bottom) and many more user-requested enhancements to make Quicken for Mac at least comparable to the legacy Quicken 2007 for Mac and Quicken for Windows. Progress is being made, but it's pretty slow.

Unknown

How do I get rid of the "difference" and percent difference columns? can I do multiple year comparisons say 2015 2016 2017 for example?

Unknown

I created a payee comparison report for charitable contributions and removed all categories but charity - how do I suppress all the non charitable payees listed?
I see they have zero balances but I want a list of just the the charitable payees - can I do that with Q17?  thanks

jacobs

Mimi: Ah, more things that are obtusely named and hidden, and more things that are better-than-before but not yet fully-featured enough!

First, the comparison report. As you've seen, it is set up to compare two date ranges. There is no way to add a third or fourth date range to the comparison. So you'd seem to be out of luck -- except a different report does nearly the same thing, and includes every year of history in your data file (or whatever years you subsequently tell it to.) To do this, select Reports > New Report again, but this time, select Summary instead of Comparison. Select Category as the type, and select Year for the Interval. Voila! You get a comparison report for all the years of data you have. (Stupidly, it doesn't ask for the date range you want first; it just does everything -- which takes awhile if you have a lot of data -- and then you can click Customize to specify a narrower date range (such as 1/1/15-12/31/17). Note that this is fine if you're comparing whole years, but there is no way to compare, say, year-to-date through July 5 across multiple years with this report.

Second, as you've seen, there is no option to suppress the difference and percent difference columns on the Comparison report. If that's really a problem for you, you could export the report and open it in Excel or Numbers, delete those columns, and clean up the formatting to your desire. Or, if you're looking for whole year comparisons, you could use the Summary report I mentioned above, with a two year date range, and you'll get a two-column report without difference/percent difference columns. (But you can't do year-to-date reports, because you can only specify a beginning and ending date.)

As for your last question, I'm not aware of a way to do the type of comparison report you're looking for. You could to a Transaction report, for one date range, selecting only your charitable contribution category, and then do a separate report for a second date range; you'd export these both and then have to do some work in Excel/Numbers to merge the data together to get the report you're looking for. Or, probably easier, would be to do a Comparison report for payees, selecting only the charitable category as you did. Then export, open in a spreadsheet, create a column which adds the two different year, sort by the total, and then delete all the rows with a zero total amount, leaving only your charitable contributions to payees in the past two years. Yes, it would be nice to be able to do this in Quicken, but in this case, it would take only a minute to get the report you want in a spreadsheet. Of course, you need to repeat the work each time you want an update report, which is why it would be better if you could do it in Quicken, if they added a checkbox to include only Payees with non-zero dollar amounts.

Unknown

To have a Comparison Report that lists every payee, even if all the comparison fields are zero, makes no sense.  Please fix this.  It has always been the way comparison reports worked in Quicken until now!

smayer97

Almost...in actuality, a category or payee, etc, would should up on a report with a zero value if there were any transactions for that category/payee, even if the net was zero...otherwise, correctly, categories/payees, etc. do not (and should not) show up if there are no transactions for them.

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Unknown

Your comment isn't clear.  Please clarify.

smayer97

If you have a purchase then a credit that zeroes out the amount, the net is $0. In QM2007, though all category/payee, etc. that have a zero amount will NOT show up on a report, that category/payee, etc. WILL show up on the report if the NET = $0.

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Unknown

OK.  But how about if you want a Comparison Report in 2017 that ONLY shows payees with values in either time period?  Unless I am missing something, I can't get it to work that way.  It shows a bunch of zero payees that are irrelevant to the comparison.  It always worked this way on other versions.

smayer97

This IDEA has been implemented in QM2017 v4.2.1, released October 2016, as per the 
2017 Release Notes, though there were still some bugs. 

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