Add ability to customize the asset class menu (37 Legacy Votes)

Darran_AUS

Definitely need ability to add own custom asset classes. The current 7 options do not allow enough distinction between asset exposure, especially considering many investments are held across multiple assets (listed property, unlisted property, ethical investments, etc etc).

Mike805

I agree, we've been asking for this for years!!!!!

annarbor6

Appreciate that custom asset classes are now available for PC users… but please don't forget about this request for the mac version. Would be really helpful

vahe guzelimian

I’ve been asking for this feature for years. I don’t know why they’re dragging their feet on this. It’s a very important feature for people who do asset allocation. A programmer could probably make this happen in one evening.

Stephen Fisher

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20391803#Comment_20391803

"now"

Not just now. It has been in Windows forever. This omission in Mac has been an irritant for so long.

Mike805

I agree. We've been asking for this capability for along time. I'm forced to use Quicken 2007 to track my allocation and return. How about getting this added now!!

Darran_AUS

Why can we not create our own custom asset classes to allow us to better manage and align our investment portfolios with our respective fund managers.

Happy to allow for a default set to be available if users only want basic standard classes, but increasingly number of variable classes now being made available it would be easier to allow users to define their own as needed.

Quicken Anja

Hello @Darran_AUS,

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

Thank you!

Quicken Anja

Hello All,

The status of this Idea has been changed to Planned as it has been accepted by our Product and Development team for future implementation. However, Quicken's product development teams do not provide an estimate of when new/enhanced features will be completed and released.

Thank you!

Tim Mc

Thank you, Anja, for the update! We look forward to the Quicken update with improved asset allocation features.

Mike805

Yea. Maybe now I'll soon? be able to retire Quicken 2007 and the computer I'm running it on.

Darran_AUS

@Quicken Anja - any updates on how this planned idea is progressing?

vahe guzelimian

the quicken Mac group is still avoiding this important feature

jacobs

@Darran_AUS There are never updates on the status of planned new features. That's because certain development projects hit unexpected snags and complexities and take longer than planned, and sometime priorities shift for a variety of reasons — and so for better or worse, they never give a clue when particular features are expected, in order to avoid angering users when inevitable delays occur.

@vahe guzelimian I don't think the Quicken Mac development team is "avoiding" this issue, because they have promised it is on their development schedule. Once an Idea (feature request) is marked as "Planned", it means that the development team has agreed to implement it, and has put it on their schedule. After that, it might be 6 months or a year or more to come to fruition, depending mainly on what other projects are in active development ahead of it. The Quicken Mac development team is quite small, and they can't work on 25 "Planned" features at once. This one was apparently just a lower priority than some of the other things they have released in 2024 and are working on for the months ahead.

This year, there's been a cadence of long-requested but somewhat smaller features, such as the securities Watchlist and Security detail screens, the recent Zillow integration, the ability to hide old categories and tags, etc. But if you look at the list of "Planned" features, some of them are very large projects to implement, and there have been clues throughout the year that they are being worked on. One example: the first release for a Business & Personal version for Mac came out late last year, but it lacked the key ability to generate invoices that many small business owners need. Creating the functionality to manage customers and invoices is undoubtedly a big development effort, and a few requests in this forum for user input indicate they have been working on it this year. I'd expect to see that emerge from the development lab sometime in the relatively near future. Another whole group of feature requests center around budgeting. From comments made by the former product manager a few years back, it's likely the developers need to significantly or completely re-write the budget part of the program to implement the features users have asked for. Here again, there have been a few requests for user input, which indicates that this project is actively being worked on.

These development efforts for things like invoicing and budgeting likely tie up several designers, programmers and testers on the very small Quicken Mac development team for many months, and that's why we haven't seen a cascade of other of the "Planned" features roll out this year. It's a double-edged sword for the development team: they could focus on the smaller projects and pump out more of them, but then the big projects which many people want to see implemented keep getting kicked down the road; or they can tackle some of the big projects, but it means pushing many of the smaller ones off for 6 - 9- 12 months or more.

Personally, I can't wait to see a bunch of the promised "Planned" features, and like most of us, wish they could all be released in the very near future. But I'm actually glad to see them taking the big bites into some of the large projects which have been on hold for years and years, even though it means some of my top wishlist items continue to wait on the back-burner for them to clear the logjam of the bigger projects.

You said in a prior post that "a programmer could probably make this happen in one evening," but I feel certain it's significantly more complex than that. 😉 Just on the surface, it requires a new window to create/edit asset classes, changes to the add/edit securities window, changes to the Portfolio screen, changes to the investment Dashboards, and likely the creation of a report for asset allocation. All those things require a designer to build the screen designs and the logic flow, review, implementation by a programmer(s), review, refinement, internal testing, customer testing, documentation for online help, and training for support representatives — not just a programmer knocking off as few code changes in a night. Because the original/current design uses only 8 asset classes, we don't know if anything in the code is hard-coded for those classes or needs significant changes to accommodate an unlimited number of user-defined asset classes. The Quicken codebase is quite complex, and very few things can be done in just a day. But as I described above, it's more a matter of allocation of the limited resources of their development team than how long the implementation work actually lasts.

Look, I get it how frustrating it is to be waiting on a desired feature like this. It would be great if the development team was larger and could pump out improvements more quickly, but the economics of the amount of revenue Quicken Mac generates doesn't support that, and we have to live with the slow pace of development. The good thing, at least, is that we can see that development keeps making progress and the program keeps getting better.

vahe guzelimian

thanks. A very thoughtful response. I agree with all you said Jacobs.

Darran_AUS

@jacobs - thanks - I was only wondering if anyone heard of any updates - but agree with everything you said - I too am in the development space and understand SDLC. You mentioned “if you look at the list of planned features” - where can I see that? Haven’t been able to easily locate the list.

Thanks again for the update.

jacobs

@Darran_AUS Yes, my long-winded reply to your question obscured the answer, which was in the first sentence. 😂 No, no one has heard any updates about when this issue will be addressed, because they never let anyone know what’s coming next or when a particular feature is slated to be worked on.

There is no one place to see a list of feature requests which have been marked as “Planned”. You have to click on each of the 12 sub-categories of Product Ideas - Quicken for Mac to scroll down and see which ideas have that status. (I clearly spend too much time here to have an awareness of what is “Planned”! 😂)