Quicken for Mac v5.11 Released

Quicken Marcus

Today we released Quicken for Mac v5.11.  There are 3 new features to check out.  1) You can now change the register font size.  We had a great discussion in the v5.10 release forum post about the register font text and how some preferred the old Helvetica Neue font vs the System Font.  Someone also mentioned they would still like be able to change the font size and that for many of us getting older, the current font was too small. Quicken Chris looked into it and added the feature.  We kept it simple so we could add it in this release.  Try it out and let us know what you think. 2) We added the ability to Transfer Share from one investment account to another one.  Some would do this when they close an account and move the shares to a different brokerage.  This feature will automatically create the remove and add share transactions in the different accounts with the primary goal of preserving the cost basis on the shares. 3) We added a summary report time interval of None so you don't have to look at things weekly or yearly, etc.  This wasn't possible before.  As always, we'll be monitoring this post for bug reports and issues so please comment here so we can see if there are problems with this release. 

Thanks,
The Quicken Mac Team

Release Notes

Version 5.11.0 (March)
5.11 adds a number of long requested features and improves stability across the product.

New Features - Change register text size and transfer shares

• NEW - In 5.11, we've added a way to customize the register text size and row height. Under the View menu, click on Register Text & Row Settings to change the text size. Making the text larger will make it easier to read. Making the text smaller will allow you to squeeze more information on the screen at a time. Previously row height was in the View menu but now we've added it to this same window, so you can make all the changes at once. While viewing the register, use CMD + or - to immediately grow or shrink the register text size. This change only affects the text used in the register rows and does not affect the text labels in the register forms or other parts of the application such as the Account sidebar.
• NEW - Also in 5.11, we've added a new feature that allows you to transfer one security or all your securities from one account to another. By using this feature, Quicken will automatically create Remove and Add Share transactions in the respective accounts and maintain the cost basis information from one account to the other. Add a transaction as you normally would in your investment account and select Transfer Shares in the transaction type to start the process or click on the Transfer Shares button in the Remove Shares form.
• NEW - 5.11 also improves reports. Under Summary Reports, there's a new None time interval. Selecting None uses the time interval defined in the customize report window as the basis of your summary report.
• NEW - Added the ability to open an account in a standalone window from the thin sidebar. Click the Account menu, hold down the CMD key, and then select an account.
• NEW - Added a My Quicken Account menu item under Help to be able to quickly view and edit one's Quicken account information.

Quality Improvements

• FIXED - Fixed the Help : Quicken Community menu item so it goes to the new Quicken for Mac forum page.
• FIXED - Fixed the new thin sidebar account list menu so that it updates correctly when accounts are added, removed or changed.
• FIXED - Fixed an issue that could cause the space between the portfolio view column headers and security detail to grow with quote updates.
• FIXED - Fixed an account connectivity issue that prevented PIN reset messages from the bank displaying to customers.
• FIXED - Fixed an issue where loans would sometimes show the wrong next payment date.
• FIXED - Fixed a number of issues that could cause the application to crash.

Constable_Odo

Hi,

Thanks for the update! I've downloaded it and hope to take advantage of the new features and stability fixes.

I checked to see if the reliable crash that I reported in this thread was fixed and it seems that it hasn't. I assume it was reported too close to the release date to make it in. I'm less concerned with fixing that actual crash and more interested in seeing a higher level of QA testing go into Quicken releases. Can you speak to any plans that the engineering team has for addressing testing and QA process for Quicken for Mac releases in the future?

Again, thanks for the update and your continued work on the product.

-Odo

japasu

Hi, it is nice to be able to adjust text-size, but regarding this function, and many others, I find it strange that you do not adhere to normal Mac functionality like pressing CMD + 0 to revert to default (100%) text-size.

JOHN M MALONEY

REALLY GREAT JOB.  LOVE NOW YOU CAN CHANGE THE FONT SIZE IN THE REGISTERS.  THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

RCinNJ

I happen to be in the process of changing Brokerage houses and am excited that it coincides with the new transfer functionality. Great timing! Anything I should be aware of in how best to move an entire account? Thanks!

jacobs

@Quicken Marcus One problem I notice with the font size change is that the "Split symbol and text in the Category column don't resize. So it if a user wants to reduce the size of text to make a more compact window, all the text reduces except this, leaving "Split" standing out as over-sized:


Similarly, a user who chooses the maximum font size for readability ends up with "Split" being under-sized:

Jim38@

Every time the New Version of Quicken pop-up appears on my desktop, I get extremely excited...eagerly hopeful that my Mac version of Quicken has finally been updated to track selective account transfers within the budget. Reality eventually sets in. Nope...still a Windows version only feature. Sadness.

jacobs

@RickO I agree there should be a way to enlarge the sidebar font as well, but I think the operative thing here is the comment from Marcus that "we kept it simple so we could add it in this release." I believe he has said previously that the register list view is mostly provide by one of the graphics libraries in macOS, so they likely found that adding a control to changing the font type and size in registers didn't require extensive re-coding. The left sidebar is likely coded differently and would take different & more work to be able to change font sizes. So what we have now is perhaps an 80% win that they were able to implement to address a longstanding request from users.

There are a lot of other user requests for changes to the sidebar involving allowing users to create their own groups or subgroups, or otherwise alter the layout of account names. Hopefully that's somewhere on the development roadmap, and when they tackle those issues, they can also add use control over font size in the sidebar.

Concordman

@RickO +1 on ability to resize sidebar; I find that I can remove my glasses now to see the registers but have to put em on with the sidebar. I hear you regarding the coding issue as it relates to the sidebar but would definitely compete this upgrade. WRT the different fonts I must confess I note very little to differentiate them. 

Overall a nice improvement from the Quicken folks

Quicken Marcus

japasu said:

Hi, it is nice to be able to adjust text-size, but regarding this function, and many others, I find it strange that you do not adhere to normal Mac functionality like pressing CMD + 0 to revert to default (100%) text-size.

Great idea.  We'll take a look.

Quicken Marcus

RCinNJ said:

I happen to be in the process of changing Brokerage houses and am excited that it coincides with the new transfer functionality. Great timing! Anything I should be aware of in how best to move an entire account? Thanks!

Definitely make sure you're using the Transfer Shares feature.  It was designed for this specific purpose.  This will move all of your securities from one account to another without much manual work on your side.  I guess the other thing to note is to create the new account before you go through the transfer process.  We can't transfer shares unless the account exists.

Quicken Marcus

jacobs said:

@Quicken Marcus One problem I notice with the font size change is that the "Split symbol and text in the Category column don't resize. So it if a user wants to reduce the size of text to make a more compact window, all the text reduces except this, leaving "Split" standing out as over-sized:


Similarly, a user who chooses the maximum font size for readability ends up with "Split" being under-sized:

Great point.  Thanks for reporting this issue.  We definitely make compromises when trying to get something out quickly but we'll take a look.

Quicken Marcus

Jim said:

Every time the New Version of Quicken pop-up appears on my desktop, I get extremely excited...eagerly hopeful that my Mac version of Quicken has finally been updated to track selective account transfers within the budget. Reality eventually sets in. Nope...still a Windows version only feature. Sadness.

This is a top priority for us as well but unfortunately, it's a big big change and will take many months to do.  The plan is that once we get through some of the infrastructure work we're doing now, we'll turn our full attention back to budgets and will redo a bunch of stuff.  In the short term, we'll probably try to allow filtering of accounts which will allow one to include one side of the transfer so that the transfers don't cancel each other out.  For example, one can include their checking account and exclude the loan account so that the mortgage payment appears in the budget.

jsurpless

Having a little trouble finding the 'None' interval option for Summary Report...

Could you offer a little guidance? Thanks!

Quicken Marcus

RickO said:

Along the lines of @jacobs comment, I think the sidebar font should change in concert with the register. If you enlarge the register font significantly, the sidebar remains small and hard to read. I think they should go together.

Great suggestion RickO.  I'm not sure how difficult it would be to add that capability but we'll look into it. Like Jacobs suggests, we're trying to find opportunistic features we can add quickly and are not letting the "perfect" stand in the way of a partial solution.  For example with the font feature, we had it working where you could change the font to anything you wanted and to any size and lots of issues cropped up because every font is different.  Also the standard Apple date field that we use has visual alignment issues with bigger font sizes.  By allowing only 2 fonts and specific sizes we were able to reduce the testing required and bugs that would crop up allowing us to ship this feature in 5.11.  We didn't look at changing the Account list font to limit the development and testing effort but its definitely something we can look at.  I saw your suggestion in the beta feedback as well.  Thanks.

jacobs

Quicken Marcus said:

jacobs said:

if a user wants to reduce the size of text to make a more compact window, all the text reduces except this, leaving "Split" standing out as over-sized:

Great point.  Thanks for reporting this issue.  We definitely make compromises when trying to get something out quickly but we'll take a look.

I'm assuming the issue is the graphic for the split symbol. Why not get rid of the symbol and just use text -- either all caps (SPLIT) or italic (split) or both (SPLIT) -- or something slightly graphical that can be done with plain text (how about <--SPLIT-->), so the text can scale up and down without any additional coding.

Quicken Marcus

Constable_Odo said:

Hi,

Thanks for the update! I've downloaded it and hope to take advantage of the new features and stability fixes.

I checked to see if the reliable crash that I reported in this thread was fixed and it seems that it hasn't. I assume it was reported too close to the release date to make it in. I'm less concerned with fixing that actual crash and more interested in seeing a higher level of QA testing go into Quicken releases. Can you speak to any plans that the engineering team has for addressing testing and QA process for Quicken for Mac releases in the future?

Again, thanks for the update and your continued work on the product.

-Odo

Thanks for reporting this issue and providing a link to your forum post. I can definitely reproduce the crash in 5.11 but it doesn't reproduce in our unreleased 5.12 app.  This means it should definitely be fixed in the next release if we don't do something else to break it from now until the release date.  

The stability of our releases has been improving when we look at our crash, care contacts and reported issue statistics.  We review these every week. Hopefully, you're feeling that this is the case but I'm guessing from your question that you may disagree.  We prioritize fixing crashes based on the number of people affected.  The specific crash you mention was hit by 5 people in the 5.10.1 release so not very many people ran into it.

In regards to our testing procedure and development processes, more and more of the product is being tested via automation and unit tests which helps ensure we don't introduce regressions.  We've also kept large parts of the product static and have only selectively added features and bug fixes which helps stabilize things. The past 3 releases have been this way.

Quicken Marcus

jsurpless said:

Having a little trouble finding the 'None' interval option for Summary Report...

Could you offer a little guidance? Thanks!

1) Click on New Report
2) Click on Summary
3) Select Row, Column = Time, and under time interval pick None.

This is NOT available in the classic reports that appear below New Report in the report menu.

sac1281

What happen to add income function under bills and income?  No tab to add 

dutchmats

Thanks.  I downloaded today.  It still lacks tracking Employee Stock Options.  Is that coming out any time soon?

jsurpless

Any thoughts on when Reports might gain functionality to show transfers to accounts that excluded from the report as a income/expense?

I think that's pretty much the last thing that's holding me up from switching over completely

AJB211

The new version runs very slow. Had this problem maybe 5 updates ago which was correct ted now it is back with V5.11. what's the fix

Jim38@

Quicken Marcus said:

Jim said:

Every time the New Version of Quicken pop-up appears on my desktop, I get extremely excited...eagerly hopeful that my Mac version of Quicken has finally been updated to track selective account transfers within the budget. Reality eventually sets in. Nope...still a Windows version only feature. Sadness.

This is a top priority for us as well but unfortunately, it's a big big change and will take many months to do.  The plan is that once we get through some of the infrastructure work we're doing now, we'll turn our full attention back to budgets and will redo a bunch of stuff.  In the short term, we'll probably try to allow filtering of accounts which will allow one to include one side of the transfer so that the transfers don't cancel each other out.  For example, one can include their checking account and exclude the loan account so that the mortgage payment appears in the budget.

Thanks for the update, Quicken Marcus. 

jacobs

@Quicken Marcus Can you clarify whether allowing transfers to be included in budgets is the same project as allowing transfers to be included in reports, or are these separate development projects? Both are recurring user concerns that show up on this forum recently. Thanks.

tscan

After I downloaded the update 5.11 for Mac and checked may accounts, a whole year of entries had disappeared!  How can I restore them?  Looks like the update wiped out my latest backups too!  Some update!

Concordman

tscan said:

After I downloaded the update 5.11 for Mac and checked may accounts, a whole year of entries had disappeared!  How can I restore them?  Looks like the update wiped out my latest backups too!  Some update!

@tscan, sounds strange that you lost history, might want to check the account register to determine if you have any filters active. 

Concordman

@Qucken Marcus, with regards to the investments update which I note is a move in the right direction ; are there any plans to move the history from the originating account to the destination account similar to what can be done in the cash & Credit card accounts. I note in the PV , in the drop down for the security, you can see the lots but all the original history/transactions are still in the original account, so if one was going to move /close an account & would want to hide the account , the original transactions would only be available if the original account stays open.

Curious if others here have experimented with the transfer feature & what are their thoughts. BTW, definitely a nice upgrade, the timing is impeccable as I am in the throws of doing some with this feature presently.

RCinNJ

Concordman said:

@Qucken Marcus, with regards to the investments update which I note is a move in the right direction ; are there any plans to move the history from the originating account to the destination account similar to what can be done in the cash & Credit card accounts. 

Concordman, thanks for bringing this up. I had just assumed that transferring "everything" meant everything. Makes me wonder if it is possible to just rename the existing account and point future downloads to the new Brokerage House? My investments' history is important to me, what Brokerage House the investments are at (and when they were transferred) is relatively trivial. 

Is renaming and repointing the account possible? If it is possible, are there unintended consequences that would make losing the history preferable?

Concordman

I suspect if you are transferring the entire account the best thing to do is just rename the existing account and point everything to the new account. Suspect that should work fine

edmontoncanuck

I am very pleased to be able to change font size in the register. 
And would be doubly pleased if I could set font and size for reports. 

LeslieB

I keep trying to transfer shares between accounts but I get an error that there are no shares to transfer. I have tried deleting and re-adding the "buy" transaction that added the shares to the first account but it still tells me I have no shares to transfer. 

NEVERMIND! I figured it out