It was a long and messy launch of 4.5 but I it's now available to everyone except App Store customers. We'll be releasing that soon. I'll post updates at the bottom of this post.
This is a huge release for us. Here are some of the great new features and bug fixes we added.
LoansFirst off, I'm excited to report that we've added the most requested customer feature...Loans. In this first iteration, we focused mostly on fixed rate mortgages.
Some of the features you'll find are:
- More loan providers - You may have noticed this already but we've increased the number of loan providers included in the list of financial institutions you can download from. Now you can even connect Quicken Loans which always seemed crazy that we didn't support it even though it's an entirely different company.
- Auto-Updating Loan Scheduled Transactions - Detailed scheduled transactions that update interest and principal every month based on the customer's loan details and amortization schedule.
- Graphs - Lots of graphs to see when your loan will be paid off and an estimated total interest paid compared to principal.
- Liability Account Conversion - Loans in the past were liability accounts. We kept this account type so if you want to continue tracking your loans this way you can. However, you will now be able to convert liability accounts to the loan feature by clicking on the Convert to Loan sheet that appears the first time you go to a liability account or if you click the Convert to Loan button in Account Settings.
- Updated file converters - Both Quicken 2007 and Windows file converters have been updated to import loans from those products.
- And a whole lot more...
Improved ReportsWe're building out our custom report feature. We added Comparison and Summary reports to 2017.
- New Transaction Reports - We just enhanced this by adding new transaction reports for category, tag, payee, account and time-based.
- Improved uncategorized transaction handling - In the new reports, uncategorized transactions will now be grouped by the sign of the amount. Positive values will be included with the income transactions and negative values will be included with the expenses.
Improved Splits
We subtly changed the way splits work and made them better.
- We got a lot of complaints about splits getting into a mode where it would change the first split line even after you’ve edited it which was clearly frustrating. There are 3 split modes: Total, Refine First Line and Remainder. If the transaction total amount is 0, then Quicken will sum the amount of the splits and update the total. The Refine First Line mode is useful when one basically wants to categorize a few items but the bulk of a purchase is the same. For example, if you typically go to Walmart for groceries but occasionally buy clothes or something else you may want to pull out just those non-standard items and categorize them separately. In this case, you want the first split line to be Groceries and its amount should decrease with each split line added. Quicken goes into this mode if the transaction total is > 0, the first split line is not edited and there are initially only 2 split lines meaning this is a new split. All other times, splits are in remainder mode where a remainder split line is automatically created if the total amount isn't reached.
- We added a new feature to adjust the transaction total to the sum of the current split values. If you increase the amount of an existing split line, a remainder split is created that basically subtracts the amount you just added which can be frustrating. This might happen if you decide to increase the amount of extra principal you pay for a month or adjust a paycheck split transaction to match actual amounts. In this case, most would want the total amount to adjust. We've added a "minus" button to the remainder split line so you can delete it. This will automatically change the transaction total value.
Improved BudgetsBudgets have been reworked. We haven’t added any new features but have made what we have work better especially when trying to create a new budget or creating a future budget.
- Clicking New Budget will now start the budgeting process.
- Quicken now asks you the starting month and year when creating a budget.
- Going to the budget view should default better especially when your budget doesn’t start in January.
- When moving the budget view to a period where there currently isn't a budget defined, Quicken will automatically ask if you would like to create a new budget using the previous budget, historical data from the previous year, or to start from scratch with zero values.
- Fixed an issue when editing a budget that spans into the next year where the year was not displaying for the month of January.
Improved Auto-Backup
- A backup is saved only when a change has been made.
- A progress indicator appears when saving the backup file. Saving the backup can take a few seconds to complete. In the past the progress indicator wouldn't appear so most didn't realize Quicken was still running while saving the backup. This makes it much clearer what is happening.
- Added a new preference that will change the backup behavior. Instead of automatically saving a backup, Quicken will ask every time before saving a backup.
Improved Register Filter BehaviorI'm a big fan of this one.
- We’ve changed the behavior for the filter bar in the register. Now the Reset Filter button won't appear until one is in a filtered state. Also, a giant red X has been added to the button which should make it more obvious when one is in a filtered state. The issue is that many times customers didn't realize they were in a filtered state and thought they had lost transactions which can be scary. Now it's pretty obvious when one is in a filtered state.
And we fixed lots and lots of bugs.
- We added blue dots to the sidebar representing newly downloaded transactions a few releases ago and continue to improve the way they work. We added a preference to mark reconciled transactions as reviewed. Fixed an issue with Web Connect accounts. They will now work as connected accounts. Also, fixed a number of transaction count issues that would occur when transactions were automatically matched.
- Fixed the transaction download count in the Account Status window for Quicken Connect accounts. Previously auto-matched transactions weren't being counted.
- Fixed a long standing issue where exporting the tax report to CSV didn't include the schedule D items.
- Fixed a crash and hang that would occur when importing Quicken 2007 and Windows files.
- Improved the reliability of online bill pay transactions by adding a number of checks that will make sure payment information meets certain criteria before attempting to process the transaction. Also fixed an issue a Quicken Bill Pay issue that would occur when linking to a Financial Institution that supported both Direct Connect and Quicken Connect connection types.
- Fixed an issue where old download and sync error messages continued to appear in Quicken even after they were resolved.
- Fixed an issue where cost basis values didn't appear in the realized gain view.
- Fixed an issue where dragging a transaction within the register would result in the amount changing if it had a complex split with transfers.
- Fixed an issue where accounts hidden from reports were also excluded from transfer and account register field pop-up lists.
- Fixed an issue where the Intuit ID didn't appear in the About Box after signing in as a different user.
- Fixed an issue where customizing the report will auto-collapse all of the rows.
- Fixed an issue where renaming a category or action to the same name as another item caused the UI to be unresponsive.
- Fixed a crash if a payee account number matches the phone number that had been paid by multiple users.
- Fixed an issue if you had a problem logging in, it would display a dialog to re-enter your credentials.
- Fixed a budget sync issue.
Lots of great new enhancements and increased stability but this much change could lead to some issues so please let us know if you encounter problems in this forum post once you get the update. Please don't call support if you check for updates and it's not available yet. Like I said, we release in small spurts and may make fixes in between releases before we allow everyone to download it. We've already updated the app once to version 4.5.1 after we started seeing a couple of people crashing in the new loan feature using 4.5. It will take time for us to get this new release to everyone. Thanks for your patience. If you do get the release, again, please report the issue here so we can find it quickly.
Thanks,
Quicken Mac Team
UPDATES
- 5/17 - 4.5.4 Released
- 5/25 - 4.5.5 Released
- 5/26 - Removed 4.5.5 from release because we discovered all 4.5.x releases have a potential issue where transactions in a bad state where a single split line doesn't equal the transaction will have their transaction total changed to match the single split line amount changing account balances.
- 6/1 - 4.5.6 released which fixes the above issue and a few other things.
- 6/9 - Released on App Store.
- 6/15 - Released 4.5.7 to App Store. Fixes the file open issue.
- 6/16 - Released 4.5.8 to retail/download customers. Has all known file open issue fixes. The difference between 4.5.7 and 4.5.8 is a crash fix that we saw people running into which usually manifested itself when people opened a minimized Quicken file while using 2 monitors.
