I’m excited to announce the release of Quicken 2017 v4.4.1 which includes a bunch of small features that many of you have been asking us to implement for years. Sorry it’s taken this long.
Please reply and comment on this forum post and let us know if you find any new issues while using 4.4 or if you’d like any improvements to the features we just added. We’ll be monitoring this forum post so adding issues here helps us find and fix the problems faster.
In this release, we’ve added:
- Auto-Backup – This is the number one requested feature from our quicken.com voting page. We’ve implemented a basic version of this for now. You can set the location and we’ll automatically maintain the 5 most recent files. Backup kicks off after one quits. Let us know what you think.
- New Transaction Account Sidebar Indicator - Blue dots now appear on the sidebar to indicate which accounts have new transactions. Note that we decided to implement this in a way that it works independently of the “reviewed” status of transactions. The idea is that we didn’t want to force people to review their transactions. Hovering over the blue dot will display the number of last downloaded transactions. This number isn’t always reliable so in the next release we’re going to improve the count.
- Orange Pencil Fix – You can now mark the orange pencil as reviewed and eliminate them. Yeah! We fixed a bunch of stuff in this area. The orange pencil doesn’t show up on new transactions in manual accounts since all transactions are manual. We didn’t want to retroactively dismiss the orange pencils but you can use the new Mark All as Reviewed feature to get rid of them with one click. In downloaded accounts, you can also Mark all Downloaded Transactions as Reviewed which doesn’t affect the orange pencil. The work flow we envision is that people will want to clear all their blue dots after reviewing them but they won’t want to clear the orange pencils so they can see what transactions haven’t been matched yet. However, if you really want to hide the orange pencil you can do this now by clicking on it and selecting Reviewed.
- Preference to Turn Off Auto-Opening Splits - We’ve added a preference so you can turn off auto-opening of splits in the registers and/or the reconcile screen. They are 2 separate preferences so you can keep it on in the register and turn it off in reconcile or define whatever combination you want.
We also made a bunch of report enhancements.
- Export or Copy from Report – We added the export feature to the new comparison and summary reports so you can move the report into a spreadsheet for further analysis or better printing.
- Print Scaling – Speaking of printing, we added the ability to scale a report in the print dialog so you can get more on a page. It’s probably not as flexible as many of you want but it’s a step in the right direction.
- Summary Report Total Column - We added a total column to the summary report.
- Prior Period – We added a new comparison report custom date option called Prior Period. We had Prior Year Period which works great if you want to compare between 2 years but sometimes you also want to compare with the previous period. For example, this month and last month or this quarter and last quarter.
- Comparison Report Difference Column Style Changes – We’ve been trying to figure out the right way to color code the difference column and to display the right sign. The goal is to allow people to quickly spot issues that need to be addressed. We’ve gone back and forth on what to do. With the help of our beta testers, we’ve decided to color code “good” things as green and “not so good” things as red. What this means is that if your income increases or if you spend less in a category the difference will be green. If you make less income or spend more, the difference color is red. We have also decided to hide zero values to reduce visual clutter and allow one to quickly see only the line items that change. We also wrestled a lot with the sign. Other products turn expenses into positives in this report. This works for category reports that have the concept of income and expense but doesn’t really work for tag or payee reports. Because of this, we decided to keep it simple and keep expenses as negatives in this report and to not try to manipulate the math.
This release has tons and tons of other stuff too including some great bug fixes.
- We used to have an Edit Budget limitation where we didn’t allow editing a budget 2 years out from the current year. This didn’t make any sense so we eliminated that limitation.
- We found a reconcile bug that had to do with manually entered transactions that get matched or posted after the reconcile period. This is fixed in 4.4.
- We found a bug in our payee name code which could result in weird payee names occurring when we convert them from what the bank sends us to something more understandable. This should be a lot better in this release.
- Fixed the top crashing issue including one that occurred when clicking on a future scheduled transaction in the calendar view. Thanks to the forum customer who described his hypothesis on why it crashed. Because of his description, I was able to reproduce the bug which allowed one of our developers to find and fix the problem.
Thanks again,
Marcus
Twitter:
@softwaremarcus
