Quicken for Mac 2018 v5.5.4 and Other 5.5.x Releases

Unknown

Since the latest updates every time I use Quicken for Mac 2018 I need to re-enter my password to backup my account to the cloud account. Is there a new work around?  This has not been a problem with the mobile version although it prompts me about once a month. Is that supposed to happen?

john2018

I've done a couple of transactions at Fidelity to see if the bug on buy/sell showing up in ttransactions but not the portfolio has been corrected.   Since updating to 5.5.5 (3/10), the transactions and the account balance have not been loading.    The Account Status shows Last Connection successful today (3/12).  If I try to reconcile, it shows the balance as of 3/10 .  

Version 5.5.5 (Build 55.21622.100)   macOS 10.13.3

s2kdriver

s2kdriver said:

Hi Marcus, I believe there is still a bug in the Specify Lots feature.  I mentioned this in a previous thread, but now have some grabs from 5.5.4 to better illustrate the problem.  Future transactions somehow influence the shares "Available to Sell" in previous transactions.  See attached screen shots.  In addition, I am putting in a plug for an "ACB" Specify Lots preset for Canadian users...

Hi Marcus - I may have spoken too soon, or perhaps run into a scalability issue.  I have a real scenario involving 131 lots - based on a DRP (dividend reinvestment plan) account with quarterly purchases over a span of >32 years.  When I sold the shares in 2 tranches, I am able to use the Specify Lots feature to define an ACB cost base method for the 1st tranche sold.  However, for the 2nd tranche (all remaining shares), the Specify Lots on that final sale is missing one of the lots (the 1st lot). The result is pretty strange, as the 2nd sell transaction clears out the account, but the Specify Lots dialog indicates there are sold shares remaining to be allocated (in the amount of the 1st missing lot).  I have tried deleting and recreating the two sell transactions in hopes of correcting this but to no avail.  In addition, this issue seems to affect the realized gain reported on the account.  The realized gain amount (from the realized gain view) is incorrect and different from the "Total Gain/Loss" preview amount shown in the Specify Lots dialog box (which is correct, at least for the first tranche sold, but not for the second tranche with the missing lot).  Perhaps this is a scalability edge case, but it may reveal a logic problem still lurking in the code.

John Morrow

John Morrow said:

For a loan already in place, how can I:

1. change the Interest category, and
2. set a category for the Principal (it was set as a Transfer by the loan wizard)

for future transactions?

The obvious place to go is the Scheduled Transaction for the loan, but it is greyed out and cannot be changed.



A backup solution is the Loan/Edit Payment Terms wizard. But it allows to do 1. only, not 2.

@SnoopyFC, doesn't your workaround mean you have to manually spread the interest and principal each month because they vary? I wish there would be an automated way to do this.

John Morrow

John Morrow said:

Reports > New Report > Customize > Categories, then:

1. Select: None
2. Then, progressively select all top level categories, starting from the top and progressing towards the bottom
3. Each time, selecting a top-level category will automatically select ALL of its children
4. EXCEPT that, at some point, ONLY SOME children will be selected
5. WORSE, some categories somewhere up or down the list will be SELECTED/UNSELECTED as a side effect
6. It looks like QM goes out of sync between the list on screen and list in memory

Example, clicking once on Vacation:


Clicking again on Vacation:


Clicking a third time on Vacation:


(For some reason, QM doesn't like me spending money on vacations. It must prefer that I spend additional money on QM itself.)

@RickO, I am wondering if the issue is not related to the number of categories / the structure of the category tree. I have 179 categories (exactly !  I counted one by one since there is no label for the number of (total / selected) categories). Most are level-2 categories, with a bunch of level-4 categories (this could be the source of the issue also).

This is a rather naughty issue as there is no guarantee that if you select/unselect a category, others will not be selected/unselected without you noticing. It happened to me again last evening.

John Morrow

jimkk89 said:

Since the latest updates every time I use Quicken for Mac 2018 I need to re-enter my password to backup my account to the cloud account. Is there a new work around?  This has not been a problem with the mobile version although it prompts me about once a month. Is that supposed to happen?

This reminds me that if I go to Preferences.../Connected Services/See All Cloud Accounts..., QM asks for my password but it didn't use to and I have not disconnected.

Is this the expected behavior?

John Morrow

Reports/New Report, I have been struggling to find the correct report template for my needs and have come to the conclusion that it would be neat to have a sort of mini-PivotTable definition widget for reports.

This would allow to generalize the current Create a Transaction Report window and allow to mix and match fields of different types and reorganize them at will. And avoid launching Excel every now and then... 

Snoopy FC

John Morrow said:

For a loan already in place, how can I:

1. change the Interest category, and
2. set a category for the Principal (it was set as a Transfer by the loan wizard)

for future transactions?

The obvious place to go is the Scheduled Transaction for the loan, but it is greyed out and cannot be changed.



A backup solution is the Loan/Edit Payment Terms wizard. But it allows to do 1. only, not 2.

Yes. I have to adjust the principal and interest each month. Not ideal, but there’s no other way I know to budget track these transactions.

Unknown

John Morrow said:

For a loan already in place, how can I:

1. change the Interest category, and
2. set a category for the Principal (it was set as a Transfer by the loan wizard)

for future transactions?

The obvious place to go is the Scheduled Transaction for the loan, but it is greyed out and cannot be changed.



A backup solution is the Loan/Edit Payment Terms wizard. But it allows to do 1. only, not 2.

Just discovered the same issue. Today. Started with Q2018for Mac two days ago after 25 years of using Quicken and my home mortgage did not carry over cleanly.  It was set up as a loan but there is no amortization from month to month, same principle and interest in each future payment.  Really?  So I'm going to need to get into my banks web site each month and look up the composition of each payment now?  

RickO

John Morrow said:

Reports > New Report > Customize > Categories, then:

1. Select: None
2. Then, progressively select all top level categories, starting from the top and progressing towards the bottom
3. Each time, selecting a top-level category will automatically select ALL of its children
4. EXCEPT that, at some point, ONLY SOME children will be selected
5. WORSE, some categories somewhere up or down the list will be SELECTED/UNSELECTED as a side effect
6. It looks like QM goes out of sync between the list on screen and list in memory

Example, clicking once on Vacation:


Clicking again on Vacation:


Clicking a third time on Vacation:


(For some reason, QM doesn't like me spending money on vacations. It must prefer that I spend additional money on QM itself.)

John, I have over 200 categories, so I don't think the total number is your issue. I didn't have any level 4, but I added on pair of level 4 categories to my setup and still cannot reproduce your original issue. Sorry. I'm not ruling out the it relates to the complexity of your category list, but doesn't look like it's strictly related to number of categories or existence of at least some level 4.

RickO

John Morrow said:

Reports/New Report, I have been struggling to find the correct report template for my needs and have come to the conclusion that it would be neat to have a sort of mini-PivotTable definition widget for reports.

This would allow to generalize the current Create a Transaction Report window and allow to mix and match fields of different types and reorganize them at will. And avoid launching Excel every now and then... 

You should go to this link and VOTE for it:

Columnar report (with selectable choices for rows and columns)

You must click the VOTE button upper right for your vote to count.

Then you might also want to review all the report related IDEAS listed here:

https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/expanded-list-of-categorized-ideas-of-feature-re...

Craig in ER

John Morrow said:

For a loan already in place, how can I:

1. change the Interest category, and
2. set a category for the Principal (it was set as a Transfer by the loan wizard)

for future transactions?

The obvious place to go is the Scheduled Transaction for the loan, but it is greyed out and cannot be changed.



A backup solution is the Loan/Edit Payment Terms wizard. But it allows to do 1. only, not 2.

Sorry to hear of your difficulties.  I also am a long time Quicken user.  I imported my Quicken 2007 data with a long mortgage loan history into Quicken 2017 (I now use 2018).  I had to do some minor tweaks to the Loan set up values but the amortization table was spot on.  Each new mortgage payment is recorded with the principle and interest exactly matching the amortization table and the statement from the bank.  I don't have to adjust anything.  I can tell you that importing a loan (from my experience) does require a little tweaking to the settings but otherwise works just fine.  I believe what I had to do was to adjust the settings as if the loan began the day/month of import into Quicken.  I set the opening balance to the current balance of the loan and the loan length to the number of payments remaining and the first payment date to the date of the import.  You should find all of your previous transactions are recorded correctly (from the import) and the future payments now enter correctly.  Entering a new loan (no previous transactions) works just fine.  I might add that my loan is an adjustable rate loan.  Every time my rate changes I have to adjust the settings I just mentioned.  I don't think the Quicken team has really made this loan creation feature work for adjustable rate loans with annual rate adjustments.  Hope this helps somewhat for you.

smayer97

John Morrow said:

For a loan already in place, how can I:

1. change the Interest category, and
2. set a category for the Principal (it was set as a Transfer by the loan wizard)

for future transactions?

The obvious place to go is the Scheduled Transaction for the loan, but it is greyed out and cannot be changed.



A backup solution is the Loan/Edit Payment Terms wizard. But it allows to do 1. only, not 2.

Thanks for sharing...you are correct that QM2018 does not currently support variable rate loans (and a few others too). It is too bad the conversion from QM2007 requires tweaking. That really should be fixed. 

John Morrow

John Morrow said:

Reports > New Report > Customize > Categories, then:

1. Select: None
2. Then, progressively select all top level categories, starting from the top and progressing towards the bottom
3. Each time, selecting a top-level category will automatically select ALL of its children
4. EXCEPT that, at some point, ONLY SOME children will be selected
5. WORSE, some categories somewhere up or down the list will be SELECTED/UNSELECTED as a side effect
6. It looks like QM goes out of sync between the list on screen and list in memory

Example, clicking once on Vacation:


Clicking again on Vacation:


Clicking a third time on Vacation:


(For some reason, QM doesn't like me spending money on vacations. It must prefer that I spend additional money on QM itself.)

@RickO, I tried to reproduce this on a brand new file with the default set of categories, and couldn't. My gut feeling, as a software programmer, is that it's related to the particular structure of my category tree (number of levels, number of siblings per level, category names, ...). (At least, my category tree exhibits this faulty behaviour.) Somehow, there is a leak or overflow in the data structure used to represent the category tree; and, when I click on a category, it selects a different one from the intended one.

RickO

John Morrow said:

Reports > New Report > Customize > Categories, then:

1. Select: None
2. Then, progressively select all top level categories, starting from the top and progressing towards the bottom
3. Each time, selecting a top-level category will automatically select ALL of its children
4. EXCEPT that, at some point, ONLY SOME children will be selected
5. WORSE, some categories somewhere up or down the list will be SELECTED/UNSELECTED as a side effect
6. It looks like QM goes out of sync between the list on screen and list in memory

Example, clicking once on Vacation:


Clicking again on Vacation:


Clicking a third time on Vacation:


(For some reason, QM doesn't like me spending money on vacations. It must prefer that I spend additional money on QM itself.)

Yup, that would be my guess as well. If you haven't already, please click menu Help > Report a Problem and send it in.

John Morrow

John Morrow said:

Reports/New Report, I have been struggling to find the correct report template for my needs and have come to the conclusion that it would be neat to have a sort of mini-PivotTable definition widget for reports.

This would allow to generalize the current Create a Transaction Report window and allow to mix and match fields of different types and reorganize them at will. And avoid launching Excel every now and then... 

Looks good, I've just voted !

John Morrow

Is there a way to set the default category to something other than Uncategorized ?

My wife has a large number of non-recurring patients and would like to record transactions with a default Income transaction but cannot. And we could rename Uncategorized or make it an income category because it's used internally. And it's not an option to let QM memorize the category for each patient because there are simply too many that are non-recurring.

RickO

John Morrow said:

Is there a way to set the default category to something other than Uncategorized ?

My wife has a large number of non-recurring patients and would like to record transactions with a default Income transaction but cannot. And we could rename Uncategorized or make it an income category because it's used internally. And it's not an option to let QM memorize the category for each patient because there are simply too many that are non-recurring.

No there isn't. The only thing I can suggest is to use a common Payee and identify the patients in the Memo, Tag or Action field. With a common Payee, the category will repeat in subsequent transactions. Tags might be best for identifying since you can customize the tags in a report. But if you use tags for other stuff, it might get confusing.

Quicken Marcus

Jim said:

Is anything being done to speed up the slow loading issue?

Jim, I'm out of ideas for the slow loading issue you're seeing.  Turning quotes off typically worked for people.  Possibly our 5.6 release will help.

In regards to seeing updates from the post, it looks like you're doing everything right.  Our forum manager is looking into it for you.

Quicken Marcus

s2kdriver said:

Hi Marcus, I believe there is still a bug in the Specify Lots feature.  I mentioned this in a previous thread, but now have some grabs from 5.5.4 to better illustrate the problem.  Future transactions somehow influence the shares "Available to Sell" in previous transactions.  See attached screen shots.  In addition, I am putting in a plug for an "ACB" Specify Lots preset for Canadian users...

Thanks for reporting this issue.  I've asked our software developer for this feature to read through your post to see if he can figure out what might be happening.  We may need more information. 

Quicken Marcus

moski said:

Marcus, I uncovered a new bug in how Comparison reports work when the two date ranges being selected have an overlap. I started a thread about it here: https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/comparison-chart-errors-data-left-out?utm_source...

I hope that link works, but in case it doesn't here are my original posts on this:

Initial: In Quicken Deluxe Mac 2018, I was creating a comparison chart to show current monthly Income vs. Expense compared to current year.  In the time period selection box when Customizing a report, the top dropdown says "Date Range" and the second one says "Compare To".  So naturally, I chose This Month as the first and This Year as the second. The date ranges next to each selection modified themselves correctly. But when I run this report it does two things. First, it puts the Year first and the Month second, which doesn't make any sense. Whatever is the first date range should be the first column in the report. But the more nefarious problem is that for some reason, in this configuration it totally ignores any data for the month. That column is all zeroes!  It's like the data doesn't exist. It does show data in the Year column, but this data is wrong because it's not including any of the data from the current month.  When I swap the Date Range and Compare To variables, to show This Year first and This Month second, then the monthly data does show up in the left column, the Yearly in the right, all the data seems to be there and it all adds up. I created a spreadsheet showing those differences...there's no place to attach that spreadsheet here but if the Quicken folks would like to see this I can send it along. It is a repeatable error.  So there is a workaround, but the behavior for this report is all hosed up.

First Follow Up: I've been studying this some more and I think I understand how their calculations are working. It appears that whatever appears in the left column is subtracted from the right column.  I tested this by playing around with using This Month vs. Month to Date in the left column (the lower date range selection). When This Month is selected, any future-dated transactions are included in the left column and that number is bigger.  When Month to Date is selected, these future transactions are removed from the left column but are now added in the right column.  This would also explain why when Year is in the left column, the right column is empty because obviously all those transactions would be subtracted from the right column.  

This means that actually, what I thought was a workaround isn't, as I'm not getting the comparison I was actually looking for.  I wanted something that I had in Quicken Mac 2007, which was a simple report that showed an expense statement for the month compared to the year so I could generally see how things are doing.  This comparison report is either calculated incorrectly, or was designed for some other reason, although I can't fathom what that would be.

Another "feature" or "bug" that I discovered is that when you click on any of the values in the report to get a drill down, it actually doesn't show the same data as the report itself. At least in the Year (right) column, when you click on any value it will actually show all transactions for the year in that category, and yet the report will only show the subtracted amount as described above.

So it is still very difficult to get at the simple Month vs. Year income statement that I am trying to see, unless there's some other way to do this.  I would love to hear from Quicken about this.

Second Follow Up: One final note and then I'm done for the day on this. The error (or feature!) seems to only exist when the two date ranges overlap, or when one date range is a subset of the other.  I have another comparison report showing last year to this year and the problems don't show up. Which makes me think this is a bug that Quicken needs to iron out.

Agreed.  We do this but obviously, we missed this one.  

Quicken Marcus

Mike OMalley said:

There is a bug in the Mac Quicken Deluxe 2018.  Heres how to replicate;
Enter a transaction and make it an account to account transfer as the category.  
Leave the program, and relaunch.  
Use the same Payee so that it comes up as a remembered transaction, with the transfer as the category.  Now go and change the category to an actual category, and hit enter.
The transaction will be recorded twice, once in that register as a category transaction, and it will also appear in the to: transfer account as a transaction.

Unfortunately, this type of behavior would be a major change to the fundamental way the product works which obviously would take a lot of time and effort to change.   Currently, there is only a single transaction that appears on both accounts.  Linked transfers were really created for manual entry to save time.  I would argue that in a download world, it's less important to link transfers and might actually cause issues as you suggest where dates get changed, etc but I do realize lots of people continue to use linked transfers and find them valuable.  The reason the issue above exists is because Quicken Mac allows categories on linked transfers which Quicken Windows and I think 2007 don't allow.   When we fix the issue above, it will become more difficult to add a category to a linked transfer but I think that's the right priority. 

Quicken Marcus

Mike OMalley said:

There is a bug in the Mac Quicken Deluxe 2018.  Heres how to replicate;
Enter a transaction and make it an account to account transfer as the category.  
Leave the program, and relaunch.  
Use the same Payee so that it comes up as a remembered transaction, with the transfer as the category.  Now go and change the category to an actual category, and hit enter.
The transaction will be recorded twice, once in that register as a category transaction, and it will also appear in the to: transfer account as a transaction.

Unfortunately, this type of behavior would be a major change to the fundamental way the product works which obviously would take a lot of time and effort to change.   Currently, there is only a single transaction that appears on both accounts.  Linked transfers were really created for manual entry to save time.  I would argue that in a download world, it's less important to link transfers and might actually cause issues as you suggest where dates get changed, etc but I do realize lots of people continue to use linked transfers and find them valuable.  The reason the issue above exists is because Quicken Mac allows categories on linked transfers which Quicken Windows and I think 2007 don't allow.   When we fix the issue above, it will become more difficult to add a category to a linked transfer but I think that's the right priority. 

s2kdriver

s2kdriver said:

Hi Marcus, I believe there is still a bug in the Specify Lots feature.  I mentioned this in a previous thread, but now have some grabs from 5.5.4 to better illustrate the problem.  Future transactions somehow influence the shares "Available to Sell" in previous transactions.  See attached screen shots.  In addition, I am putting in a plug for an "ACB" Specify Lots preset for Canadian users...

Thanks Marcus - please ask your developer to reach out on email if you need additional information or specific details.

s2kdriver

Mike OMalley said:

There is a bug in the Mac Quicken Deluxe 2018.  Heres how to replicate;
Enter a transaction and make it an account to account transfer as the category.  
Leave the program, and relaunch.  
Use the same Payee so that it comes up as a remembered transaction, with the transfer as the category.  Now go and change the category to an actual category, and hit enter.
The transaction will be recorded twice, once in that register as a category transaction, and it will also appear in the to: transfer account as a transaction.

Thanks Marcus for providing good background information on the original intent and current implementation of the linked transfer feature.  I have found a method that works for me and can live with the current capabilities/limitations.  However, if you make modifications in the future, I hope you can retain the capability to somehow categorize a linked transfer.  I do use this in some circumstances and find it useful.

Quicken Marcus

John Morrow said:

There's an issue with CSV exported reports. The file does not open well in Excel. When UTF-8 characters are present, they show as gibberish (see screenshot below).



Re-saving the file as UTF-8 with BOM seems to fix the issue. But this has to be done manually and is clearly not a long term workaround.

@marcus, this probably rings a bell from your previous life...

We have this fixed for 5.6 for the new reports.  We're going to make them UTF-16 which appears to work in Excel.  We won't have time to go back to change the legacy reports but those can be imported into Excel correctly.  On import Excel allows you to set the encoding and once you pick UTF-8 as you note, the legacy report CSV files will import correctly. 

RickO

Mike OMalley said:

There is a bug in the Mac Quicken Deluxe 2018.  Heres how to replicate;
Enter a transaction and make it an account to account transfer as the category.  
Leave the program, and relaunch.  
Use the same Payee so that it comes up as a remembered transaction, with the transfer as the category.  Now go and change the category to an actual category, and hit enter.
The transaction will be recorded twice, once in that register as a category transaction, and it will also appear in the to: transfer account as a transaction.

Marcus... it will be unfortunate if the changes remove the ability to use a category with a linked transfer. There are times when it is really valuable to show the transfer (in the transfer column) and also use a category for reporting purposes.

Quicken Kathryn

Jim said:

Is anything being done to speed up the slow loading issue?

@Jim - your account looks correct in the back end--can you check your SPAM and junk folders and see if the emails are ending up there?  Sometimes they can trigger at (seeming) random--if there are no email notifications there, please let me know--

Quicken Kathryn

Quicken Marcus

John Morrow said:

I just came across the following bug:

1. All transactions, type something in the search box.
2. Preferences, change transactions display from Short to Long.
3. Go back to All transactions. The display has been updated and most transactions show a Long category, but some do not.

Thanks for reporting this issue.  I'm still not able to reproduce it but I'm also thinking this might be a lower priority item given some of the other things you're reporting.  Would you agree?  This is only temporary, right?

Quicken Marcus

John Morrow said:

There is another issue with CSV exported reports. Amounts show up in at least three different columns. This makes it impossible to post-process.

See example below:

This looks like the legacy Category Summary Report.  I realize there's the UTF-8 issue with the new reports but the new reports have all the numbers in a single column.