Transfers appearing in Category Summary report

John Keating

In QM19, items that are categorized as just "transfer" (i.e. with no associated transfer account) will appear as a total in the Category Summary report, under "Transfer".

• Transfers should not appear in the Money In/Out sections of the report at all and shouldn't affect their totals. They should only appear in the report's Transfers ghetto at the bottom.

Furthermore, if they don't have a tag, they don't appear as transactions; only in the heading total. This makes it impossible to figure out specifically what transactions are in the total since there's nothing to click on in the report under the Transfer section.

I use this category when transferring to/from accounts that I'm not tracking in Quicken.

jacobs

I've never been been a fan of Quicken Mac even offering a category called Transfer. To me, it's misleading, because it acts like a category, but it's a special category designed to be excluded from income and expenses in reports. In fact, Quicken Help makes a case for using the Transfer category in instances that I think should always be done as linked account transfers, such as moving money between checking and brokerage accounts, between checking and savings accounts, or for paying credit cards. (It makes sense to me only if you have some of your financial accounts in Quicken and other sources of funds you don't have in Quicken. It can also make sense if you download transactions from financial institutions such that the transfer out of one account downloads separately from the transfer into another account -- where there's no way for a downloaded transaction to specify an actual other account within Quicken.) 

In terms of the reports, keep in mind that Category Summary is one of the "old style" reports which are carry-overs from the 2010-era Quicken Essentials. If you use instead "New Report", set it to subtotal by Category, and set your date range, you'll see it shows Income and Expenses, period (e.g. no "transfers ghetto" at the bottom.) The New Report engine is a work in progress, but expect to see all the old reports eventually disappear and and expanded selection of the New Report reports.

John Keating

jacobs said:

I've never been been a fan of Quicken Mac even offering a category called Transfer. To me, it's misleading, because it acts like a category, but it's a special category designed to be excluded from income and expenses in reports. In fact, Quicken Help makes a case for using the Transfer category in instances that I think should always be done as linked account transfers, such as moving money between checking and brokerage accounts, between checking and savings accounts, or for paying credit cards. (It makes sense to me only if you have some of your financial accounts in Quicken and other sources of funds you don't have in Quicken. It can also make sense if you download transactions from financial institutions such that the transfer out of one account downloads separately from the transfer into another account -- where there's no way for a downloaded transaction to specify an actual other account within Quicken.) 

In terms of the reports, keep in mind that Category Summary is one of the "old style" reports which are carry-overs from the 2010-era Quicken Essentials. If you use instead "New Report", set it to subtotal by Category, and set your date range, you'll see it shows Income and Expenses, period (e.g. no "transfers ghetto" at the bottom.) The New Report engine is a work in progress, but expect to see all the old reports eventually disappear and and expanded selection of the New Report reports.

I agree about the special-case nature of category Transfer; it requires you to know that it's (supposed to be) excluded from reports. Transfers to/from named accounts are visibly different so it's a little easier to see that they might be treated differently.  But I do need generic transfers as you describe, for accounts that I'm not tracking in Quicken. In the end, probably the best solution is what others have already proposed: to allow the user to decide how to report transfers as QM2007 did. As a related issue, doesn't QWin allow categories that are neither income nor expense? This is an alternate approach I guess; allowing the user to decide on a case-by-case basis how a category is treated.

Regarding the reports... yes, it seems we're still stuck in the limbo between the old and new ones where the old Category Summary has the format I like, but the new one gives me the correct values, albeit in a format I loath. I hope the best of both worlds is coming soon.

jacobs

jacobs said:

I've never been been a fan of Quicken Mac even offering a category called Transfer. To me, it's misleading, because it acts like a category, but it's a special category designed to be excluded from income and expenses in reports. In fact, Quicken Help makes a case for using the Transfer category in instances that I think should always be done as linked account transfers, such as moving money between checking and brokerage accounts, between checking and savings accounts, or for paying credit cards. (It makes sense to me only if you have some of your financial accounts in Quicken and other sources of funds you don't have in Quicken. It can also make sense if you download transactions from financial institutions such that the transfer out of one account downloads separately from the transfer into another account -- where there's no way for a downloaded transaction to specify an actual other account within Quicken.) 

In terms of the reports, keep in mind that Category Summary is one of the "old style" reports which are carry-overs from the 2010-era Quicken Essentials. If you use instead "New Report", set it to subtotal by Category, and set your date range, you'll see it shows Income and Expenses, period (e.g. no "transfers ghetto" at the bottom.) The New Report engine is a work in progress, but expect to see all the old reports eventually disappear and and expanded selection of the New Report reports.

What do you find loathesome about the format of the new reports? I like ‘em better than the old ones, (but I haven’t used them a lot except for testing).

John Keating

jacobs said:

I've never been been a fan of Quicken Mac even offering a category called Transfer. To me, it's misleading, because it acts like a category, but it's a special category designed to be excluded from income and expenses in reports. In fact, Quicken Help makes a case for using the Transfer category in instances that I think should always be done as linked account transfers, such as moving money between checking and brokerage accounts, between checking and savings accounts, or for paying credit cards. (It makes sense to me only if you have some of your financial accounts in Quicken and other sources of funds you don't have in Quicken. It can also make sense if you download transactions from financial institutions such that the transfer out of one account downloads separately from the transfer into another account -- where there's no way for a downloaded transaction to specify an actual other account within Quicken.) 

In terms of the reports, keep in mind that Category Summary is one of the "old style" reports which are carry-overs from the 2010-era Quicken Essentials. If you use instead "New Report", set it to subtotal by Category, and set your date range, you'll see it shows Income and Expenses, period (e.g. no "transfers ghetto" at the bottom.) The New Report engine is a work in progress, but expect to see all the old reports eventually disappear and and expanded selection of the New Report reports.

First, that I can't get them to look like the old ones.  

So as an example, I'm trying to compare the old CS report values to a new report because I discovered that the total in my "Mortgage" category differs between the two reports (I'm still working on THAT problem). I have rental houses I identify using a different tag for each property.

The old report let me drill down into the category and it retained the groupings and totals by tag. But the new report, when I click the total for my Mortgage category, just lumps all transactions into one big list not grouped by tag, so while I can sort it by property, there's no way for me to customize that list to TOTAL by property. Instead, I have to modify/re-run it for each of my tags to see the tag totals for that one category. Alternatively, if I subtotal the top level report by tag, I can't get totals for the categories within those tags.

Also the lack of flexibility on intervals when creating a Summary report is a problem. I don't want all my reports grouped by year or week, etc... I need a "no interval". Interval should be a modifier, not a requirement.

The new reports are also aesthetically barren. The old ones had better looking formatting, fonts, shading on the headers, and used colors for positive/negative values. Just my preference.

So to repeat the part we already know: I'd like QM2007 flexibility with an improved QM19 UX. I appreciate that they're releasing new versions, but wish the improvements in those versions were in the reporting.

John Keating

jacobs said:

I've never been been a fan of Quicken Mac even offering a category called Transfer. To me, it's misleading, because it acts like a category, but it's a special category designed to be excluded from income and expenses in reports. In fact, Quicken Help makes a case for using the Transfer category in instances that I think should always be done as linked account transfers, such as moving money between checking and brokerage accounts, between checking and savings accounts, or for paying credit cards. (It makes sense to me only if you have some of your financial accounts in Quicken and other sources of funds you don't have in Quicken. It can also make sense if you download transactions from financial institutions such that the transfer out of one account downloads separately from the transfer into another account -- where there's no way for a downloaded transaction to specify an actual other account within Quicken.) 

In terms of the reports, keep in mind that Category Summary is one of the "old style" reports which are carry-overs from the 2010-era Quicken Essentials. If you use instead "New Report", set it to subtotal by Category, and set your date range, you'll see it shows Income and Expenses, period (e.g. no "transfers ghetto" at the bottom.) The New Report engine is a work in progress, but expect to see all the old reports eventually disappear and and expanded selection of the New Report reports.

Well this is sad. I just discovered the problem I mentioned above with the Mortgage totals differing between the old and new reports. The new report is omitting several valid transactions. Guess I'll go file this as a bug.

Stephen Fisher

In my old DOS/Windows versions there used to be a "cash out" choice which makes the most sense to me.

What if you create a dummy account entitled something like "All my non-Quicken stuff", and keep it "hidden", not included in totals. Then you would make a REAL transfer to that account with all these kind of transactions. Would that solve the problem?