Quicken for Mac 2017 v4.5.4 Released

Straz

You report having gotten a lot of complaints before about splits changing the first split line from others, but for me, the previous behavior of updating the first split line to keep the overall total unchanged was exactly what I wanted. Since the upgrade, my current cash entry, in which I start with $500 from my bank's ATM, and later document where it all went, is no longer automatically in the first line to keep the total unchanged. Instead, it adds a correcting entry to the bottom each time I add a detail line, forcing me to use a calculator to figure out the needed correction to apply manually to the first line of the split after my changes. If I understand correctly, this won't happen the next time I create such an entry, so long as I never manually edit that first line's amount. We'll see. Meanwhile, I wish there were an option to turn off the new behavior for those of us that liked it the old way.

Unknown

Love the update. Weirdly, my loan payment number is off my one  (one too high, as if it started counting at 2) even though I entered the first payment date appropriately. The last payment (in 25 years or so) in Quicken thus combines the actual last two payments on the Payment Schedule and ends in 12/2042 instead of 1/2043 and makes the payment larger than it should be (since it is combining two months).

My hunch is that Quicken has trouble dealing with the loan being funded in 12/2012 but the first payment not being due until 2/2013, so it is counting payment 1 as a zero amount.

Any thoughts?

Also, a quick question: if my loan amortizes correctly as it does (sans the last two payments) is there any reason for online access to my loan provider? It does not seem as if anything would actually be done.

And ... I kind of liked the old split calculation better as well, but it's not as critical now that loans are handled correctly. Thanks for that!

Craig in ER

Marcus,
I love the work the Quicken team is doing to make Quicken for Mac better with each release.  Thank you so much.  Happy to see Loan Amortization added.  There is an issue that I believe needs to be addressed.  I pay my bills through a Brokerage Cash Management Account (CMA) through an investment company.  This account is a checking account within a brokerage account.  Many brokerage accounts have check writing features.  There are many of these types of accounts available.  In Quicken 2017 I am able to enter deposits and make payments from my CMA just fine.  When I bring up this account Quicken allows Payment/Deposits to be made including entering check #s.  Here is the problem.  When I set up my loan account and get to the screen to select from which account the loan should be paid my CMA is not in the list because it is a brokerage account!  You need to make ALL accounts available in the Pay From drop down list in the loan set up.  This loan payment is the only bill I cannot set up to be paid from my CMA.  So, I had to convert the loan back to a liability and now have to make manual entries for this loan payment in my CMA.  I can't use the Loan Amortization feature.  Bottom line is you need to let us set up our loans to be paid from any account.  Does anyone have a work around for this issue?

qmac_scott

Pamela Dellal said:

I installed the latest update, and was horrified to see that the program rewrote some reconciled transactions as different amounts! Specifically, recurring transactions that had changed their amounts in 2017 were recorded as the 2016 amounts, even for bank transactions that had cleared correctly. There did not seem to be any way to fix these numbers, so I had to back out and restore my previous Quicken version and data file. 

Has any progress been made on debugging this? I am holding off upgrading until this one is found/fixed or proved to be false because this is a scary one since I am not sure I'd even notice until it was to late to revert to a backup! Thank you.

David Argust

David Argust said:

Marcus,

I had posted this in the prior thread, but did not get any response.  Is this something unique to me?

==============================================

I was just notified to download the latest release of Quicken for Mac.  I performed the download and am now on release 4.5.4

In my previous use I go to the All Transactions view with the filter set to "Not Reviewed" to see my not reviewed transactions.   In this new release this filter does not seem to work as I now continue to see all transactions both reviewed and not reviewed.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

isn't the pencil on an item for something that was manually entered.  If I manually entered something why do I want to later review it.   What I want to review is something I haven't seen before which would be something that was downloaded.

Admittedly my opinion, but the prior function seems much more logical than the current function.   I guess it depends upon what your definition of reviewing means.

smayer97

smayer97 (QM2007, CDN user since '92) said:

@Quicken Marcus As per your request here: 
https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/quicken-for-mac-2017-v4-5-4-5-1-4-5-2-released?t...
here is another user find their Category preference being changed from Long to Short:
https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/with-q-2017-v-4-5-4-sub-categories-are-on-longer...

and a related issue that I have seen reported before is that predictive typing of the sub-category does not seem to work when typing ":" as it automatically selects the first one. See here: https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/typing-a-category-and-colon-not-working-with-pre...

Craig in ER

smayer97 (QM2007, CDN user since '92) said:

@Quicken Marcus As per your request here: 
https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/quicken-for-mac-2017-v4-5-4-5-1-4-5-2-released?t...
here is another user find their Category preference being changed from Long to Short:
https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/with-q-2017-v-4-5-4-sub-categories-are-on-longer...

I can confirm also that this is happening.  Definitely defaults to the first category item in the list after you type the first ":" (colon) after typing the first few letters of the parent category.  The full name of the parent category is populated but as soon as you type the colon for the subcategory Quicken defaults to the first item on the Category list.

Quicken Marcus

JSH56 said:

Great update. Like the new loan capability. 

HOWEVER, I am now getting Loan Sync Errors on Principal and Interest. I think it is due to the fact that the loan payment calculated by Quicken is different than my actual loan payments. How can this be remedied? (I tried to add principal, but in one case, the calculated loan payment is too high)

It is a rounding error but not because we were sloppy about it.  We are very aware of the rounding issues.  We spent months trying to get the formula right trying different loans from different providers and came to the conclusion that there doesn't appear to be a standard way of rounding by the industry.  It's different for every loan provider so our calculation will be off by a cent. Sometimes it will be right on target. And you can't use loan calculators on the web and assume they are correct.  We've come across many that are just flat out broken. In the end, it doesn't really matter as long as interest is correct.  Sorry, I know this is a little annoying but I assure you we spent a bunch of time on this.  Quicken Windows works the same way.

Quicken Marcus

David Argust said:

Marcus,

I had posted this in the prior thread, but did not get any response.  Is this something unique to me?

==============================================

I was just notified to download the latest release of Quicken for Mac.  I performed the download and am now on release 4.5.4

In my previous use I go to the All Transactions view with the filter set to "Not Reviewed" to see my not reviewed transactions.   In this new release this filter does not seem to work as I now continue to see all transactions both reviewed and not reviewed.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Sorry, I read it and meant to reply but couldn't find the bug that we had on this.  A beta tester also reported this and it's not 100% reproducible but I forget the exact instances of why it works most of the time but sometimes doesn't.  I'll keep looking for the ticket to provide more details but thought I would respond so you know I read this.  

Craig in ER

JSH56 said:

Great update. Like the new loan capability. 

HOWEVER, I am now getting Loan Sync Errors on Principal and Interest. I think it is due to the fact that the loan payment calculated by Quicken is different than my actual loan payments. How can this be remedied? (I tried to add principal, but in one case, the calculated loan payment is too high)

I have two loans set up in Quicken 2017.  One is spot on! It is amortized correctly to the penny.  The other (different loan company) is off by .02 each month.  I can handle that.  Interestingly, this loan is a zero interest loan.  Because most loan amounts divided by the number of payments in the loan result in an odd final payment amount in the last month I wonder if Quicken isn't able to calculate a monthly payment that is the same for all months except the last.  Just wondering.

Quicken Marcus

smayer97 (QM2007, CDN user since '92) said:

@Quicken Marcus As per your request here: 
https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/quicken-for-mac-2017-v4-5-4-5-1-4-5-2-released?t...
here is another user find their Category preference being changed from Long to Short:
https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/with-q-2017-v-4-5-4-sub-categories-are-on-longer...

I saw the category weirdness last night.  I was trying to add a new sub-category but couldn't.  I'll write up a ticket for this and we'll fix it asap.

Quicken Marcus

jsurpless said:

Curious if reports function yet with tags like Q2007 used to work with classes?

Categories on the left as rows and classes on the top as columns

We definitely know this is an important report especially those that track property.  We do not have this ability yet.

Quicken Marcus

Jim said:

Thank you for the improvement on splits. I've gotten better at figuring out how to edit an existing split in order so that I don't have to re-enter the first split line item.

There is an unrelated split issue, but I have a workaround so it is not a huge deal. In the register view for an account (or multiple accounts, e.g., All Transactions) when I sort what I see by Category the Split items show up as if "Split" is the name of a category and I don't get the underlying line items sorted appropriately. I suppose it would be nice to have a checkbox to expand all splits to solve this. The workaround is that when I export the Register Transactions to CSV the individual line items show up on separate rows with the same date, check#, and payee [thank goodness!]. Thus I can sort the spreadsheet by Category the way I like. I haven't checked to see yet if anyone has pointed this out or made a suggestion to vote on.

Thanks for this suggestion.  Can you explain your use case or why this layout is helpful to you?  I can guess but I like to better understand the big picture.  Thanks.

Quicken Marcus

Pamela Dellal said:

I installed the latest update, and was horrified to see that the program rewrote some reconciled transactions as different amounts! Specifically, recurring transactions that had changed their amounts in 2017 were recorded as the 2016 amounts, even for bank transactions that had cleared correctly. There did not seem to be any way to fix these numbers, so I had to back out and restore my previous Quicken version and data file. 

I'm working with Pamela on this.  I haven't been able to reproduce it yet but she's tried it multiple times and it happens for her all the time.  Not sure what is unique in her file yet.

Quicken Marcus

Straz said:

You report having gotten a lot of complaints before about splits changing the first split line from others, but for me, the previous behavior of updating the first split line to keep the overall total unchanged was exactly what I wanted. Since the upgrade, my current cash entry, in which I start with $500 from my bank's ATM, and later document where it all went, is no longer automatically in the first line to keep the total unchanged. Instead, it adds a correcting entry to the bottom each time I add a detail line, forcing me to use a calculator to figure out the needed correction to apply manually to the first line of the split after my changes. If I understand correctly, this won't happen the next time I create such an entry, so long as I never manually edit that first line's amount. We'll see. Meanwhile, I wish there were an option to turn off the new behavior for those of us that liked it the old way.

The functionality of changing the 1st line now only works the first time you're creating the splits.  Are you going back to that transaction later multiple times every time you spend the cash?  Yup, that makes perfect sense to me.  If you are doing this, then unfortunately the new behavior won't work for you.  There are 2 ways around this.  1) You can enter in all of the split items at the same time.  This continues to work as it used to but once you save, it fall back to adding a remainder. Or 2) You can add separate transaction for each item you spend on.  I think this is what most people do but I can understand the desire to see the hierarchy of where the cash came from and what it was spent on. 

Quicken Marcus

Richard Wagoner said:

Love the update. Weirdly, my loan payment number is off my one  (one too high, as if it started counting at 2) even though I entered the first payment date appropriately. The last payment (in 25 years or so) in Quicken thus combines the actual last two payments on the Payment Schedule and ends in 12/2042 instead of 1/2043 and makes the payment larger than it should be (since it is combining two months).

My hunch is that Quicken has trouble dealing with the loan being funded in 12/2012 but the first payment not being due until 2/2013, so it is counting payment 1 as a zero amount.

Any thoughts?

Also, a quick question: if my loan amortizes correctly as it does (sans the last two payments) is there any reason for online access to my loan provider? It does not seem as if anything would actually be done.

And ... I kind of liked the old split calculation better as well, but it's not as critical now that loans are handled correctly. Thanks for that!

Oh interesting.  You may want to try entering in the Maturity date instead of the first payment date to see if that corrects the issue.  It sounds like you know the maturity date should be 1/2043 so enter that in to see if it changes things.  If that doesn't work then it would be helpful to have the numbers you entered in the loan details screen.  It doesn't have to be your actual numbers but something that illustrates the issue so we can reproduce what you're seeing.  

Quicken Marcus

Craig in ER said:

Marcus,
I love the work the Quicken team is doing to make Quicken for Mac better with each release.  Thank you so much.  Happy to see Loan Amortization added.  There is an issue that I believe needs to be addressed.  I pay my bills through a Brokerage Cash Management Account (CMA) through an investment company.  This account is a checking account within a brokerage account.  Many brokerage accounts have check writing features.  There are many of these types of accounts available.  In Quicken 2017 I am able to enter deposits and make payments from my CMA just fine.  When I bring up this account Quicken allows Payment/Deposits to be made including entering check #s.  Here is the problem.  When I set up my loan account and get to the screen to select from which account the loan should be paid my CMA is not in the list because it is a brokerage account!  You need to make ALL accounts available in the Pay From drop down list in the loan set up.  This loan payment is the only bill I cannot set up to be paid from my CMA.  So, I had to convert the loan back to a liability and now have to make manual entries for this loan payment in my CMA.  I can't use the Loan Amortization feature.  Bottom line is you need to let us set up our loans to be paid from any account.  Does anyone have a work around for this issue?

Yes, that makes sense.  We also have a bug that Quicken Bill Pay doesn't work with investment accounts either because of this bias.  This has already been fixed internally but we haven't released it yet.  I'm just piling on with regard to us being blind about investment accounts being used as checking accounts. Anyway, I'll definitely file this issue and we'll get it fixed soon.

Quicken Marcus

RickO said:

Just updated to 4.5.4. It went smoothly except that my investment balances where all out of whack.

On further investigation, I found that opening balance placeholder transactions had been entered in several of the accounts. In one case, there was a $300,000+ positive opening balance adjustment added for an account that has an approximate $4,000 balance.

After deleting these erroneous placeholders, all balances returned to normal. Note that this only affected the cash balances in the accounts, not the quantities of security holdings.

Oh my?  That's crazy.  I'm not even sure how that is possible but obviously you're seeing it.  I'll reach out to you directly.

Quicken Marcus

RickO said:

@Marcus.... A bug has been introduced in 4.5.4 that causes an investment quote update to be triggered when a Pay Now action on a Direct Connect Bill Pay checking account transaction has completed. This should not occur when the user has automatic quote download disabled in Preferences. 

For more detail, see here:

https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/qmac-2017-v4-5-4-bill-pay-manage-investments-bug...

You know I paid a bill last night using Pay Now but didn't notice the quote thing coming up (which I'm sure I hate as much as you guys).  I'll try again tonight and will report back.  We have already filed a bug.  

Unknown

Richard Wagoner said:

Love the update. Weirdly, my loan payment number is off my one  (one too high, as if it started counting at 2) even though I entered the first payment date appropriately. The last payment (in 25 years or so) in Quicken thus combines the actual last two payments on the Payment Schedule and ends in 12/2042 instead of 1/2043 and makes the payment larger than it should be (since it is combining two months).

My hunch is that Quicken has trouble dealing with the loan being funded in 12/2012 but the first payment not being due until 2/2013, so it is counting payment 1 as a zero amount.

Any thoughts?

Also, a quick question: if my loan amortizes correctly as it does (sans the last two payments) is there any reason for online access to my loan provider? It does not seem as if anything would actually be done.

And ... I kind of liked the old split calculation better as well, but it's not as critical now that loans are handled correctly. Thanks for that!

I tried that and it didn't change anything. Very odd. I'll send the info later.

Jim3

Jim said:

Thank you for the improvement on splits. I've gotten better at figuring out how to edit an existing split in order so that I don't have to re-enter the first split line item.

There is an unrelated split issue, but I have a workaround so it is not a huge deal. In the register view for an account (or multiple accounts, e.g., All Transactions) when I sort what I see by Category the Split items show up as if "Split" is the name of a category and I don't get the underlying line items sorted appropriately. I suppose it would be nice to have a checkbox to expand all splits to solve this. The workaround is that when I export the Register Transactions to CSV the individual line items show up on separate rows with the same date, check#, and payee [thank goodness!]. Thus I can sort the spreadsheet by Category the way I like. I haven't checked to see yet if anyone has pointed this out or made a suggestion to vote on.

So here is just one thing I wanted to do recently. I wanted to look at all transactions from an international trip we took, but see it organized by category. I use keywords in the memo field to distinguish trips, and filter for those keywords in the All Transaction register window. Then I click on the column title for Category to sort by that. But that turns out to be useless because all my split transactions are sorted as if they were a single transaction with a category named "split".


I am able to do what I need if I export the register to a CSV. The extracted data has one row for each transaction, including the individual line items of a split as if they are individual transactions. So I can sort on the category and that separates my different types of expenses as one would expect.


Actually, I cannot think of a use case where a user who sorts-by-category a list of transactions would not want the individual line items of split transactions to find their proper place among the non-split transactions, e.g. food expenses together, fuel expenses together, entertainment expenses together, etc.


Hope this helps explain it.

smayer97

smayer97 (QM2007, CDN user since '92) said:

@Quicken Marcus As per your request here: 
https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/quicken-for-mac-2017-v4-5-4-5-1-4-5-2-released?t...
here is another user find their Category preference being changed from Long to Short:
https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/with-q-2017-v-4-5-4-sub-categories-are-on-longer...

Good...what about the preferences issue also mentioned?

smayer97

jsurpless said:

Curious if reports function yet with tags like Q2007 used to work with classes?

Categories on the left as rows and classes on the top as columns

@Quicken Marcus Thx. But please do not limit its use case...there are MANY MORE applications to this format. If you are not already, I highly recommend you take cues from at least QM2007 on how flexible it is to customize so you build it at least as good as that.

smayer97

Jim said:

Thank you for the improvement on splits. I've gotten better at figuring out how to edit an existing split in order so that I don't have to re-enter the first split line item.

There is an unrelated split issue, but I have a workaround so it is not a huge deal. In the register view for an account (or multiple accounts, e.g., All Transactions) when I sort what I see by Category the Split items show up as if "Split" is the name of a category and I don't get the underlying line items sorted appropriately. I suppose it would be nice to have a checkbox to expand all splits to solve this. The workaround is that when I export the Register Transactions to CSV the individual line items show up on separate rows with the same date, check#, and payee [thank goodness!]. Thus I can sort the spreadsheet by Category the way I like. I haven't checked to see yet if anyone has pointed this out or made a suggestion to vote on.

So it sounds to me exactly like the use case for reports that should also generate the same info using the sorting and subtotal features that QM2007 reporting has. 

So this functionality needs to be built into at least one place, that is, reports. If it is also built into the register view, all the better, unless you want one UI place to handle each type of functionality. 

Straz

Straz said:

You report having gotten a lot of complaints before about splits changing the first split line from others, but for me, the previous behavior of updating the first split line to keep the overall total unchanged was exactly what I wanted. Since the upgrade, my current cash entry, in which I start with $500 from my bank's ATM, and later document where it all went, is no longer automatically in the first line to keep the total unchanged. Instead, it adds a correcting entry to the bottom each time I add a detail line, forcing me to use a calculator to figure out the needed correction to apply manually to the first line of the split after my changes. If I understand correctly, this won't happen the next time I create such an entry, so long as I never manually edit that first line's amount. We'll see. Meanwhile, I wish there were an option to turn off the new behavior for those of us that liked it the old way.

Sounds like you understand the problem of what used to work, and what I'm trying to still do. Ideal solution would be to make the new behavior switchable in preferences, so I can still use that feature as I have for close to 20 years now.

Steve122@

JSH56 said:

Great update. Like the new loan capability. 

HOWEVER, I am now getting Loan Sync Errors on Principal and Interest. I think it is due to the fact that the loan payment calculated by Quicken is different than my actual loan payments. How can this be remedied? (I tried to add principal, but in one case, the calculated loan payment is too high)

Hi Marcus,

Thanks for the comments. My calculations come from the exact payment formula, not a web calculator.

The exact monthly payment formula is P = L[c(1+c)^n]/[(1+c)^n - 1], where L=loan amount, c = monthly interest rate, and n=number of payments.  In this formula, (1+c)^n is (1+c) raised to the power of n. In my case, L=382500, c=0.02875/12, n=180.  Put in the numbers (which I did on my calculator) and you get P = $2618.540668.  But Quicken says $2618.55 instead of $2618.54.

I would guess that the most standard way of rounding is to round anything less than half a cent down, and round anything greater than or equal to half a cent up.

But, if you think that some lenders might not round this way, then you should leave it as a user option to choose the payment for the loan so we can match the payments we are currently making with our lender.

Steve

smayer97

Straz said:

You report having gotten a lot of complaints before about splits changing the first split line from others, but for me, the previous behavior of updating the first split line to keep the overall total unchanged was exactly what I wanted. Since the upgrade, my current cash entry, in which I start with $500 from my bank's ATM, and later document where it all went, is no longer automatically in the first line to keep the total unchanged. Instead, it adds a correcting entry to the bottom each time I add a detail line, forcing me to use a calculator to figure out the needed correction to apply manually to the first line of the split after my changes. If I understand correctly, this won't happen the next time I create such an entry, so long as I never manually edit that first line's amount. We'll see. Meanwhile, I wish there were an option to turn off the new behavior for those of us that liked it the old way.

A preference option would be a good choice....

BTW, that feature to automatically update the 1st line has NOT been around for 20 years. I believe it was introduced in QM2015 only a couple of years ago. I use QM2007 and it does not exist there. It always adds an extra line for 1st time entry and follow-up edits.

Straz

Straz said:

You report having gotten a lot of complaints before about splits changing the first split line from others, but for me, the previous behavior of updating the first split line to keep the overall total unchanged was exactly what I wanted. Since the upgrade, my current cash entry, in which I start with $500 from my bank's ATM, and later document where it all went, is no longer automatically in the first line to keep the total unchanged. Instead, it adds a correcting entry to the bottom each time I add a detail line, forcing me to use a calculator to figure out the needed correction to apply manually to the first line of the split after my changes. If I understand correctly, this won't happen the next time I create such an entry, so long as I never manually edit that first line's amount. We'll see. Meanwhile, I wish there were an option to turn off the new behavior for those of us that liked it the old way.

You may be right. I'm new to Quicken for Mac in the past year. Prior to that, I used Quicken on Windows PCs (can't recall whether there was a DOS version that I used before Windows 3.1)

Unknown

This build has messed up entering transfers. In the previous one (the one that was out for months before the 4.5 cycle) in the account field I could enter, for example:
[s

It would then show me all accounts to transfer to that started with an "S" and I could move down the list with the cursor and select the one I wanted, or I could type additional letters to narrow the list further.

Now when I type [s, it automatically fills in Transfer:[ but sticks my cursor in the middle of the word Transfer and further tying must makes a mess of it. So essentially all typing [ does now is give me a list of all of my accounts which is useless.

Bring back the old behavior please.

jacobs

Straz said:

You report having gotten a lot of complaints before about splits changing the first split line from others, but for me, the previous behavior of updating the first split line to keep the overall total unchanged was exactly what I wanted. Since the upgrade, my current cash entry, in which I start with $500 from my bank's ATM, and later document where it all went, is no longer automatically in the first line to keep the total unchanged. Instead, it adds a correcting entry to the bottom each time I add a detail line, forcing me to use a calculator to figure out the needed correction to apply manually to the first line of the split after my changes. If I understand correctly, this won't happen the next time I create such an entry, so long as I never manually edit that first line's amount. We'll see. Meanwhile, I wish there were an option to turn off the new behavior for those of us that liked it the old way.

@straz: instead of entering a $500 cash withdrawal and constantly modifying it as you spend the money, here's a better alternative that works well for me. Create a new Account in Quicken called Cash. (I actually have one for me and one for my wife.) When I withdraw money from the bank, I enter the withdrawal in my checking account as a Transfer to the cash account. Then, when you spend cash, you simply record your spending as new transactions in your cash account. You get more detail -- payee and date, as well as category -- for each expenditure, and a running balance of your remaining cash. Every now and then, I reconcile my Quicken cash account with what's in my wallet and make and adjustment to actual.