Add Reconciliation Report to Quicken for Mac (88 Legacy Votes)

jacobs

MichelleH said:

So many people have requested this, I don't understand why the developers aren't putting this as a priority.

I agree that many people have requested this. But the issue is simply that many people have requested many, many features.

What's your top priority may not be the same as other Quicken users, and the developers are constantly evaluating which changes and enhancements they think will help the most people. They haven't gotten to this request yet, but that doesn't mean they won't.

Chris27

I am not exactly sure "people have requested many, many features" on what those are, and it would be interesting to see the primary data source. Nevertheless, the subj report is basic. The non-customizable start screen is another one. The devs need to take some time off from the whackamole financial downloads and get back to basics. The cost of this software now is at a point where it needs to be at par with similar features of other financial apps. Curious to see the questions that gets ask in an upcoming survey!

jacobs

Chris27 said:

I am not exactly sure "people have requested many, many features" on what those are, and it would be interesting to see the primary data source.

Well, they have multiple data sources, but the one that's public which we can all see is the Product Idea posts on this community forum. A month or two back, I a did a quick scroll through the roughly dozen Idea sub-categories for Quicken Mac, there were about 600 enhancement requests proposed by users. (Some of those idea posts actually represent multiple feature requests.) More than 50 are marked "Under Consideration", meaning they got enough votes for the site moderators to advance the ideas to the product development and management teams. More than a dozen are marked as "Planned", which signifies that they have not only agreed with the idea and agree to implement it, but slotted it somewhere on their development roadmap.

And as I said, that's not a comprehensive list of things they are or will be or might be working on. The developers get ideas from the Quicken Support team based on their interactions with customers, from other social media like Facebook forums, from other people within Quicken who have ideas about making the program better, from things competitors may put out, from features developed in Quicken Windows or their new Simplifi product, etc. Additionally, Infrastructure issues -- changes for evolving bank security protocols, changes to keep up with each new operating system, changes to keep up with hardware developments like the M1 Macs, etc. -- don't show up on the idea lists, but are of course necessary and sometimes time-consuming projects just to keep Quicken operating in a changing world. 

Chris27 said:

Nevertheless, the subj report is basic. The non-customizable start screen is another one. The devs need to take some time off from the whackamole financial downloads and get back to basics. 

Your statement exemplifies my point exactly. First, the "whackamole financial downloads" are, most likely, the single most important feature across users of Quicken. The fact that it's an ever-changing, ever-shifting mess, and that download and connectivity problems constitute the largest number of posts here, and, I'd guess, the largest number of support calls they get, make is pretty apparent that they need to work on improvements to the infrastructure. In the current case, their service provider, Intuit, is replacing one of their connectivity systems with a newer one which should work better with the ongoing changes they encounter from financial institutions; as such, implementing that change requires code changes across all of Quicken's product lines. And if they get it right, when they're done, users won't see a single new feature, but will hopefully just encounter fewer connectivity problems over time. No, they can't ignore the single biggest weakness of Quicken; they need to invest time in it. (And I write that as someone who mostly enters his transactions manually and doesn't even depend on connectivity to my financial institutions.)

Beyond that issue, though, you say the two features you have identified are "basic". If I had the time to hunt through hundreds of posts on this site, I'd be able to point you to dozens and dozens of other features which fellow users say are "basic", "obvious", "simple", etc.  Ask people who hold shares of a company which has split off or acquired another how "basic" the omission of an investment divestiture/acquisition feature is. Ask people who have vision issues how "basic" support of Dark Mode is. Ask people who use Quicken to minter their investments how "basic" the absence of investment reports is. Ask people who budget how "basic" the absence of a viable year-to-date actual-versus-budget report is. Ask people who have tried to convert from Quicken Windows to Mac but can't get their because one type of investment transaction in Quicken Windows doesn't get imported correctly how "basic" a need that is. I could go on, but you get the idea... there are lots of good, important and, yes, basic, ideas awaiting action. 

I don't disagree agree with the request for the developers to create a reconciliation report, but for me personally, I never used a reconciliation report in three decades of using Quicken, and have no need for one now. 

I don't disagree agree with the request for the developers to create a customizable home screen, but for me personally, I never use the home screen unless I click on it by accident. (Perhaps if it were vastly different, I might find it useful.)

My point is that those two issues wouldn't rank in the Top 10 of my wishlist for Quicken. If you ask 100 Quicken Mac users to name their top 1 or 3 or 10 feature requests, you'll get very different answers. We all use Quicken differently, so it's not surprising. And thus the problem that there are many idea requests, and many good ones which would benefit many people among them, but the Quicken Mac development team, for a variety of reasons, just can't tackle many issues very quickly. And thus we all await each new release with eagerness, and are often disappointed when our top issues aren't among the ones addressed this time.

After that somewhat depressing analysis, I'd like to end on a positive note. The reason I'm still bullish on Quicken Mac is because I look back at where the program was when the new generation program appeared as Quicken 2015, or even three years ago, and I can see that there is indeed lots of progress which has been made. Lots of new features and improved features make the program much more capable than it was 3 or 6 years ago. To be sure, there's still a lot to do, but over time, the developers are chipping away at the feature requests we users throw at them. I'm pretty sure three years from now, there will still be features we'll be lamenting which haven't been implemented -- but there will also be a lot of things which have been addressed over those three years. 

Chris27

Thanks for your comments. Bit depressing if social media is driving some of the devs ideas! Switched to Mac about five years ago. Most underwhelming program is Quicken. I cannot even get a Net Worth Report to center on a page! Yet, I still pay the same as the windows version. Thanks again, I do sincerely appreciate your insights and time.

tvc

> @jacobs said:
> Carolyn, one thing to understand about the new-generation of Quicken for Mac is that some features from the past don’t exist simply because they haven’t gotten around to coding them yet. The developers had to start over from scratch, and they have a long list of feature requests from users as they work through re-developing 20+ years of work on the old Quicken. It’s taking a lot longer than they expected, and a lot longer than many users want. The only good thing is that they are making progress, and there are new features every couple months.
>
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> That said, in some cases they have tried to re-think the way things should work — in some cases making improvements over the old versions, and in other cases making things worse.
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> I’m not quite sure if the reconciliation report falls into the category of “just not done yet” or “we don’t think this is needed.” So it’s good for users to post here about features they want, because the developers sometimes don’t understand how people use the software.
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> In that vein, I’d be interested to learn why a reconciliation report is important to you. I reconcile my accounts every month, but have never generated a report when I do so; I just check things off in the reconcile window. So I’m interested in understanding what a reconcile report does to help you reconcile your accounts.

It's good business to have a reconciliation report. Even for your personal bookkeeping. While it doesn't happen often, I have had transactions "go missing" probably because of an accidental deletion, and when that happens, it is a real pain in the neck to have to go back and "re-reconcile" months of activity.

jacobs

tvcQuicken said:

It's good business to have a reconciliation report. Even for your personal bookkeeping. While it doesn't happen often, I have had transactions "go missing" probably because of an accidental deletion, and when that happens, it is a real pain in the neck to have to go back and "re-reconcile" months of activity.

that's exactly why the developers added the Reconciliation History feature. I don't know if you've tried it, but in a test file, I tried things like deleting a past transaction, changing the amount of a past transaction, changing the reconciled state of a past transaction -- and in all cases, the Reconciliation History screen showed me not only which reconciliation was now changed, but showed me the actual transaction(s) which changed, and allowed me to revert to the original state -- such as arresting an accidentally-delated transaction. -- with a single button click. It seems pretty slick to me. It seems it was clearly designed with the assumption that people don't have printed records of their reconciliation history but need to easily identify what changed in the past.  

This not an argument against there being a way to print a reconciliation report; it's a feature I think they should add even though I don't personally have a need for it. I just think many Quicken users may not be aware of the excellent Reconciliation History feature and how it protects you from changes to previously-reconciled transactions. 

fijigirlann

How can this type of software not have a reconciliation report. Why is it only available for Windows and not for MAC. Please upgrade the MAC version to give us this much needed report. Thank you.

jacobs

fijigirlann said:

How can this type of software not have a reconciliation report. Why is it only available for Windows and not for MAC. Please upgrade the MAC version to give us this much needed report. Thank you.

It's quite simple, actually: they haven't considered it a higher priority than all the other things they've been working on. That doesn't mean they don't think it's worthwhile, as you suggest; it only means they haven't yet seen it as a top priority to implement.

I'd guess that they considered the implementation of Reconciliation History a year ago satisfied many users' needs for having a record of prior reconciliations, and adding a printed report was lower on the priority list. (For me personally, for instance, I've never felt the need to print each month's reconciliation report, as long as I can look back in Quicken and see what was reconciled when.) 

As you may be aware, the current Quicken Mac is a rewrite of the legacy Mac program which was developed over about 25 years. And Quicken is a surprisingly complex program, so adding features is a slow-moving process. Here's the problem: there are more than 500 Idea posts in this forum alone for Quicken Mac, many of which are perfectly good and useful ideas — so the absence of a particular feature generally means nothing more than that they haven't gotten to it yet. The developers have to sift through all the feature requests and decide which ones have the biggest impact on the largest number of people, and have to evaluate how long they expect each item would take to incorporate in the program, and the schedule of the programmers and designers needed for each specific feature, among a variety of factors. 

This particular Idea thread currently has 149 votes (a combination of the vote counter and "legacy" votes which were cast when this forum was hosted on a different software platform), which is a fairly large number for Idea posts here. The Idea is tagged with a status of "Under Consideration", which means due to the number of votes, it has been forwarded to the product and development teams for consideration. In the somewhat peculiar way Quicken works, they don't marked an Idea as "Planned" once they agree it's a good idea; they only mark it "Planned" when it has been assigned a specific time slot on their programming schedule. So a lot of ideas show "Under Consideration" for a long time, until they get assigned to specific programmers and designers to work on for a future release.

Roger Gill

I too say a reconciliation report is a must.

[email protected]

Quicken for Windows has reconciliation for checking and credit card accounts. This should be available in Quicken for Mac.

Quicken Anja

Hello @[email protected],

Thank you for reaching out to the Community with your request.

Your idea has been merged into this already active Idea thread regarding the same request.

Thank you!

jacobs

For everyone who has been waiting and waiting for a printable reconciliation report in Quicken Mac, the wait is over! A reconciliation report is one of the new features in the version 6.12 release. 

MichelleH

Yay for the upgrade that includes bank reconciliation reports!!!! At long last!

jkwin48

Where is this new reconciliation report? Under Reconciliation History, correct?

Jon

Yes, in the Reconciliation History window, there's a new Report column with options to either view or print the reconciliation report for that month. It's only available for bank accounts, not investment accounts.