Need account register report (and export) without split detail

jacobs

I rarely reconcile

I guess I'd note that a major reason for doing a monthly reconciliation comparing to what a bank statement shows is to catch any mistakes — omission, duplication, wrong amount — right away, rather than struggling to identify a fault transaction sometime over the past 6 months. 😉 I don't know how many transactions you have monthly in your checking account, but unless you write tons of checks, a reconciliation should take only a few minutes.

I don't want 5 gas transactions in my check register. I guess you are referring to the credit card register? 

Correct.

If you have a separate Quicken account for a credit card, then the only transaction regarding that credit card in your checking account each month is a single transaction on the date you paid the credit card bill. That transaction is a Transfer to the credit card account; it has no category or splits.

So then I run a spending category report and that would include all the cards and checking? 

Yes, assuming you want to see all your expenses for the month. It would include transactions from all your accounts — although you can limit which accounts are included, should you wish to, by editing the report settings.

Or a spending dashboard shows a summary of categories from all those accounts (credit cards, checking)?

Yes, the Home > Spending by Category Dashboard card would include spending from all accounts, unless you edit it to exclude certain accounts.

Because if I'm going to the trouble of setting up 5-6 cards from scratch, I need to set up web relationships with 4 of them first.

I'm not sure I understand this question. You can set up as many or few credit cards as you want. As I previously mentioned, if you want to give this a try, I'd start with one to see how it works, and you can add others in subsequent months if you wish. You have the option of entering transactions manually in the credit card account(s) or connecting to the financial institution to download transactions into Quicken. But you have to have a login to the credit card company account in order to do this, so if you don't currently, yes, you would need to do that first. (Nowadays, it's a good idea to have access to your credit card accounts online — whether you download to Quicken or not — in order to check for suspicious or fraudulent charges from time to time.)

Do credit cards show up in the sidebar under their own section so I can just collapse it? 

Yes, the same as Checking, Cash, or Retirement; Credit Cards is a separate section under the main Banking group, and can be collapsed if desired. (Many people like to see the credit cards in the sidebar, as it gives you an up-to-date view of current balances and what you'll need to be paying off in the near future.)

but if Quicken would just let me see my top line transactions out of checking, none of this would be on my radar

Well, you can see the transactions in your checking register. The only issue is that you can't print a report of the transactions without the splits. And that's what this feature request at the top of this thread is asking for. (Make sure you've added your vote for it in the yellow box under the top post.)

As something of a workaround report until the developers (hopefully) address this, you might also consider taking one or two screenshots of your checking account register and printing them, unless you have too many transactions each month for this to be practical. On my iMac's screen, I can get between 1.5 and 2 months of transactions — about 38 or 39 transactions — in my checking account per screen, so taking and printing a couple of screenshot is pretty easy for a month or two. If you wanted to print all transactions for last year, that would be sort of cumbersome, but for a given month, it's viable unless you have more than 100 transactions a month.