Quicken for Mac v5.11 Released

Quicken Marcus

AJB211 said:

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

Is anyone else seeing slowness?  We're not seeing it here. Can you try to reboot your Mac to make sure it's Quicken and not something else?

Quicken Marcus

jsurpless said:

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

jacobs said:

@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.

I consider transfers on reports separate from budgets but they may be related under-the-hood. I don't know. jsurplass, thanks for the note about Transfers in reports being the last thing you need before completely switching. I also know that many are waiting for better Transfer support on budgets.  We've got a bunch of stuff being completed for release in late April early May that we've been working on since November of last year.  Once we're past that big hurdle, we can tackle other big software architecture changes.

Quicken Marcus

edmontoncanuck said:

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. 

Understood. The account sidebar, budgets and the calendar also need improved font control.

Quicken Marcus

RCinNJ said:

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?

We consider these as 2 different features: Move Shares and Transfer Shares.  We decided to do Transfer Shares.  When discussing these features with a number of customers in another forum post, we felt that Transfer Shares was the better of the 2 because it more closely preserved the reality of having 2 different brokerage accounts. The closed account would maintain the history while the new account contained just the current holdings.  Move shares would also require additional work to maintain explicit lot assignments when the transactions were "moved" to the new account.

RCinNJ, you can disconnect from one brokerage and reconnect to a new one but there could be some clean-up required like removing transfer share transactions but it probably wouldn't be too bad.  This would be a reasonable workaround for those who want the simplicity of having a single account that has the entire investment history regardless of the brokerage where transactions were created. 

Quicken Marcus

sac1281 said:

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

There was never an Add Income button but there probably should be one.  You don't really need one, though.  You can just create a scheduled transaction in your checking account and if it's an income transaction, it will appear under the Income tab.

Quicken Marcus

Concordman said:

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. 

Please do look to see if you have a filter set.  We get calls all the time in Care about Quicken losing people's data only to find out they have a filter set. If you see a button with a red x  and the text Clear Filters, then you have a filter set.  This is very common.

dhuck

Version 5.11.0 appears to be modifying file permissions when exiting, preventing multiple users from sharing the same data file. This used to work fine on previous versions (at least since December 2018) after setting the appropriate permissions to allow both users R/W access to the data file, but now starting with 5.11.0 I need to manually reset permissions on the data file every time after quitting in order to allow the other user to access the file. Reverting to v 5.10.1 resolves this issue, so this appears to be a regression introduced in 5.11.0.

Can this be fixed?

2coolbaby

I cannot update to 5.11.0  In fact, my last successful update was 5.6! When running my Quicken, it downloads and tries to Install in my Applications, but I think because Quicken in running, it won't install it. I get this error: An error occurred while relaunching Quicken, but the new version will be available next time you run Quicken. Well, it isn't. I've been getting this error for months when I try to install and restarting and reopening the app just brings up the install update circle. Unfortunately, I can't find where it downloads it to my mac. I've checked Downloads, Desktop and not there, so I can't close the app and just install in the Applications folder and overwrite the old one. I'm at a loss here. I have downloaded a backup and the only thing I can think to do is to delete the current one. Then download a copy from My Account and then install fresh and import the backup.

s2kdriver

Quicken Marcus said:

We consider these as 2 different features: Move Shares and Transfer Shares.  We decided to do Transfer Shares.  When discussing these features with a number of customers in another forum post, we felt that Transfer Shares was the better of the 2 because it more closely preserved the reality of having 2 different brokerage accounts. The closed account would maintain the history while the new account contained just the current holdings.  Move shares would also require additional work to maintain explicit lot assignments when the transactions were "moved" to the new account.

Hello Marcus - the new Transfer Shares action is an excellent improvement, and I agree with your choice of implementing Transfer Shares vs. Move Shares due to the reason you cite above - the reality of having different brokerage accounts that live on independently.  However, while I hate to be a broken record about this, the resulting Remove Shares action still has a defect - it treats share removal as a 100% loss from a performance measure perspective (IRR, ROI).  This incorrectly affects the IRR and ROI of any remaining shares of the same security in the account, the IRR and ROI of the share type and asset class in the account, and the overall IRR and ROI for the account. In other words, it makes the IRR and ROI measurements useless for that account.  I have brought this up multiple times in the past, but have given up mentioning it due lack of response.  However, since you are working in this area again, I thought I would ask if you intend to look at this issue and fix it.  Thanks.

jacobs

2coolbaby said:

I cannot update to 5.11.0  In fact, my last successful update was 5.6! When running my Quicken, it downloads and tries to Install in my Applications, but I think because Quicken in running, it won't install it. I get this error: An error occurred while relaunching Quicken, but the new version will be available next time you run Quicken. Well, it isn't. I've been getting this error for months when I try to install and restarting and reopening the app just brings up the install update circle. Unfortunately, I can't find where it downloads it to my mac. I've checked Downloads, Desktop and not there, so I can't close the app and just install in the Applications folder and overwrite the old one. I'm at a loss here. I have downloaded a backup and the only thing I can think to do is to delete the current one. Then download a copy from My Account and then install fresh and import the backup.

@2coolbaby Yes, you're on the right track. This happens from time to time with users; there's something that's getting stuck trying to install within your current application file, but it's easy to get around. by getting rid of your current Quicken application and downloading a fresh copy from Quicken.com.

To make sure things don't go really south, the first thing I'd do is preserve but "hide" your current Quicken application: go to the Applications folder, click once on Quicken.app to select it, and pull down Compress from the File menu. You'll end up with a new file there, Quicken.app.zip. If anything goes wrong going forward, you can just double-click on that and your Quicken.app will reappear ready for action. So with that backup in place, you can now drag Quicken.app to the Trash and empty the Trash.

Now go to your account on Quicken.com and sign in. On the My Account page after you log in, scroll down to the Download Quicken section, and click on Download for Mac. A file called Quicken.dmg will download to your Desktop or Documents folder, wherever your Mac is set up for downloads to go. Double-click on the Quicken.dmg file, and then double-click on the Quicken Installer.app. This will install a new Quicken.app in your Applications folder. Finally, you can double-click on Quicken.app, Quicken will launch, and it should find your data file, update it, and have you up and running. (Once you're running successfully, you can go back and trash that Quicken.app.zip file you made as a backup.)

David Parisi

Version 5.10 was supposed to allow Canadian cheques to print correctly. It didn't work and still doesn't work with the latest release. I sent a voided Canadian cheque to Quicken using the "report a problem" tab in "help". Perhaps that might help.

Thanks!
dp

Quicken Marcus

David Parisi said:

Version 5.10 was supposed to allow Canadian cheques to print correctly. It didn't work and still doesn't work with the latest release. I sent a voided Canadian cheque to Quicken using the "report a problem" tab in "help". Perhaps that might help.

Thanks!
dp

David, I found your "report a problem" screenshot.  From the picture, I can't really tell what the issue is or possibly this is a picture of how it should work.  Can you provide more detail about what isn't working so we can try to fix it?  We tested using official Quickbook Canadian checks.  Are you changing the check style to Canada in the print check dialog?

Quicken Marcus

dhuck said:

Version 5.11.0 appears to be modifying file permissions when exiting, preventing multiple users from sharing the same data file. This used to work fine on previous versions (at least since December 2018) after setting the appropriate permissions to allow both users R/W access to the data file, but now starting with 5.11.0 I need to manually reset permissions on the data file every time after quitting in order to allow the other user to access the file. Reverting to v 5.10.1 resolves this issue, so this appears to be a regression introduced in 5.11.0.

Can this be fixed?As far as I know we haven't changed anything like that.  

I'm not aware of any changes in 5.11 that would have changed this behavior and I actually don't think we do anything with permissions.  I think this is all handled by the OS?  Can you describe in more detail what you're doing?  Do you have the file on a file share accessed by different computers or are you using the same computer with a shared folder?  In general, it would be great to get a detailed explanation of your setup so we can try to reproduce the issue here. 

dhuck

Hi Marcus,

My wife and I each have our own user account on the same computer, and we switch between them user Fast User Switching. The Quicken data file we both share is located in /Users/Shared, so all accounts and files are located on the same SSD - no network file share is involved. Permissions were originally set up on the Quicken data file to allow R/W access for me, my wife, wheel, and everyone. This has worked fine from December 2018 through version 5.10.1, and we could each open the shared Quicken data file without issue after the other user had exited the program.

Starting with version 5.11.0 this no longer works. After the first user exits Quicken 5.11.0, the second user receives the following error message when opening Quicken:



By messing around with the data file permissions I'm eventually able to get the second user to access the data file successfully, but then the first user can no longer access it without more messing around. Reverting back to 5.10.1 allows both user to once again access the file without changing any permissions. I haven't been able to figure out exactly what is changing, but based on this behavior I'm beginning to suspect it's more an difference in how the file permissions are being interpreted when opening the data file (using 5.10.1 versus 5.11.0) than how the permissions are being set when writing the file.

Please let me know if there's any more information you need to reproduce this issue. Thanks for your help.

jacobs

@dhuck I'm actually surprised to hear this had worked for you previously; it definitely hasn't always been that way. My understanding is that this type of configuration wasn't encouraged/suggested/supported by Quicken, but Marcus might clarify. The thing to know is that the Quicken data file isn't really a single file; it's a Mac file called a package, which is a wrapper around a folder of folder and subfolders that appears to the Finder and parts of the OS as a single file. (If you right-click on your data file, select "Show Package Contents" and you'll see all the files and folders contained within your data file.) The issue is that all these files and subfolders have read-write permissions, and if anything gets changed or messed up, you can be blocked from accessing something (as you've encountered) or even worse, you can get permanently locked out of your file because some permission gets messed up with that you may be able to figure out or fix. 

Unless Marcus advises differently, here's what I'd suggest you do: Put your Quicken data file on your desktop or Documents folder. (Make sure you're not allowing iCloud to store these folders in iCloud; post back if you're not sure about how to do that.)  When you're done using Quicken, create a Backup file before you quit. Move that backup file -- which is a .zip compressed version of your file which is impervious to permission changes -- to the shared directory on your Mac. (Alternatively, you can not make the backup from within Quicken, and instead, in the Finder do File > Compress on the data file to create a .zip file.) When your wife wants to use it, she'd copy the backup file from the shared directory to her desktop or documents folder, open it, and use Quicken. When she's done, she'd make a backup and copy it back to the shared directory.

In short: keep a backup or compressed (.zip) copy of the latest Quicken file in the shared directory, and when either user wants to use Quicken, copy it to their desktop, uncompress it, use it, back it up/compress it, and move it back to the shared directory. By both of you always starting from the copy on the shared directory, you can be assured you're always working on the latest copy. I know that may sound tedious, but in reality it will take just a few seconds before and after each Quicken session to compress and move -- and it should avoid all permission problems.

smayer97

An alternative to all this is to create a dedicated user where Quicken and the data file are stored and switch to that user for use. That way the permissions are tied to that user would not change.

dhuck

Thank you jacobs and smayer97 for your suggested workarounds. I appreciate your responses, and while it's clear that both of your suggestions would avoid the permissions issue with version 5.11.0, unfortunately they are not good options for us due to their impact on our existing workflow (we each need access to our personal email & 1password accounts when using Quicken) as well as the potential for lost transactions in the event that the backup, compress, and move procedure suggested by jacobs is not followed exactly each and every time (by my wife ).

In any event I'm not looking for a workaround here, but instead I'm reporting a regression in behavior with this version of Quicken as requested by Quicken Marcus in his original post, and hoping that development team can restore the previous behavior in the next release. While I realize the previous behavior of allow multiple users to access the same data file is not officially supported by Quicken, it did work fine through multiple versions previously and it is how standard Macintosh programs behave, so I'm a bit surprised that this release broke it.

Marcus, have you had any success in reproducing this behavior? FWIW I am running High Sierra, and my account is an admin user while my wife's account is a standard user.

Also from my investigation it appears that both versions of Quicken are leaving the data file package and all of the enclosed items (catalog, data, & locks) with the exact same file permissions set, so this is why I believe the change in behavior is due to the way Quicken is checking the files at launch. I don't suspect an OS issue since it has been held constant in my experiments, and I can go back and forth between the 2 versions of Quicken and the behavior always tracks whichever version of Quicken I am using at the time.

One last bit of info, in order to make version 5.11.0 work as I'd like, after quitting Quicken I need to reset the file permissions on the catalog and data files so that both users, wheel, and everyone have R/W access. If a workaround eventually becomes necessary I will probably just figure out a way to automate this process, but hopefully that won't be necessary.

jacobs

@dhuck I hear you about wanting it to work the way you want it to work, and I can only say then to be sure you're keeping multiple, many generations of backup files. I've seen users for whom this approach worked for years... until the day that they suddenly were locked out of their Quicken data and no amount of playing with permission would fix it. As long as you're forewarned that you're playing with fire, then take all possible precautions and hope for the best.

Bobby Treat

Where is this "thin sidebar", if it exists? Also, where's the "Account" menu? I see "Accounts", not "Account", and nothing happens if I hold down cmd and try to click on the sidebar.

slhcrnp

Thank you for the continued improvements to QFMac.  

RCinNJ

Bobby Treat, click on the arrow head symbol on the top right of the side bar and it will collapse (and uncollapse). Hover over the $ symbol and it will say "Show Account...". Click on it and the account(s) menu appears without opening up the side bar. Don't know about Cmd clicking.

jacobs

@Bobby Treat Adding pictures to what @RCinNJ wrote:

Regular sidebar:


Click on the "<" in the blue sidebar header, and you get the thin sidebar:



Clicking ">" expands back to the regular sidebar. Hovering over "$" generates a pop-up list of all your accounts, so you can switch accounts without expanding the sidebar.

PDM8279

In 'Bills and Income' cannot change a value of a recurring $ amount. A dialog box appears stating Cannot Send Payment. I don't have Bill Pay initiated and prefer to pay bills from my bank web site. This changed with 5.11.0 install.

dgsimm

I recently purchased Quicken for Mac Deluxe 2019. The conversion of my Quicken Mac 2007 files went smoothly.  However, my accounts had a mixture of taxable and non-taxable (IRA) securities.  The conversion process did not preserve the categories of non-taxable income for dividends, interest, long/short capital gains in the transaction registers.  Instead there appears to be only one category for those types of income.  Was this intentional and if so why?  Also, on the securities detail screen, checking the box Tax Free seems to have no impact that I can see.  Please explain.

Quicken Eli

s2kdriver said:

Hello Marcus - the new Transfer Shares action is an excellent improvement, and I agree with your choice of implementing Transfer Shares vs. Move Shares due to the reason you cite above - the reality of having different brokerage accounts that live on independently.  However, while I hate to be a broken record about this, the resulting Remove Shares action still has a defect - it treats share removal as a 100% loss from a performance measure perspective (IRR, ROI).  This incorrectly affects the IRR and ROI of any remaining shares of the same security in the account, the IRR and ROI of the share type and asset class in the account, and the overall IRR and ROI for the account. In other words, it makes the IRR and ROI measurements useless for that account.  I have brought this up multiple times in the past, but have given up mentioning it due lack of response.  However, since you are working in this area again, I thought I would ask if you intend to look at this issue and fix it.  Thanks.

S2kdriver –

Thanks for your post.  It helped us to identify a NEW problem that is actually different from what you thought it was.  The good news is that the underlying problem that you have been reporting for a while actually has been fixed.  Starting in Release 5.9, Add Shares and Remove Shares transactions are included in the performance calculations at “market value” (based on the price history) as of the date the shares are added to or removed from the register.  (Acquisition Date of an Add Shares is not considered for this purpose, nor is the cost basis information that you enter on the form.) 

What we did uncover because of your post is that the Remove Shares transaction that is automatically created by the Transfer Shares operation has the wrong sign for the number of shares.  This does not affect the overall holdings and reporting, but it does impact the Performance calculations and is what is causing the problem that you are now seeing.  This will be fixed, and the transactions automatically corrected, in the next release.  In the meantime, there is a simple workaround.  Edit the Remove Shares transaction that was created by the Transfer Shares operation.  Temporarily change the number of shares and save the transaction.  Then go back and edit it again and restore the correct number of shares.  After you save it the second time, the error will be corrected and the IRR and ROI calculations will be accurate.

Note that the Add Shares transactions in the “Transfer to Account” do not have the same problem and you do not have to do anything to them.  Also, any manually-created Remove Shares transactions should be yielding accurate performance results.

Please try this out and let us know if it is working for you. 

jacobs

@dgsimm It's possible that your accounts were not coded correctly in Quicken 2007 when you imported your file, but let's dig in to understand your situation.

Do you have separate Accounts in Quicken for your retirement and non-retirement accounts? And do they all show up correctly in the left sidebar, under the Brokerage and Retirement subheadings of Investing? If not, there might be a simple fix:

Click on one of your accounts which is a retirement account. Select Settings from the Accounts menu. Check the Type field to see what it shows, and if it's not showing the proper type of retirement account, select it from the drop-down menu


Click Save. You should now see this account listed under Investing > Retirement in the left sidebar.

It's the account type that determines what investment income is taxable or not, not separate types of transactions.

Or do you have taxable and retirement securities held in the same investing account? If so, that makes record-keeping more complicated. I've never done my investments that way, and I'll bow out and let some of the folks here who know investments in Quicken better than I do try to help you if that's the case.

Quicken Eli

dgsimm said:

I recently purchased Quicken for Mac Deluxe 2019. The conversion of my Quicken Mac 2007 files went smoothly.  However, my accounts had a mixture of taxable and non-taxable (IRA) securities.  The conversion process did not preserve the categories of non-taxable income for dividends, interest, long/short capital gains in the transaction registers.  Instead there appears to be only one category for those types of income.  Was this intentional and if so why?  Also, on the securities detail screen, checking the box Tax Free seems to have no impact that I can see.  Please explain.

@jacobs – Thanks for jumping in here, but I think the question is not about retirement accounts, but really about tax-free bonds (like municipal bonds) or tax-free bond or money market funds within a taxable account.  The dividend or interest income from these securities is not subject to taxes, although, unlike retirement accounts, the income does need to be reported on your income tax forms.

@dgsimm – Thanks for reporting this.  This is a request for improvement that has been made a few times before.  For example, see

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7341499/tax-exempt-dividends-for-muni-bonds-in-quicken-mac

This is currently a very high priority on our list of improvements.

s2kdriver

Quicken Eli said:

S2kdriver –

Thanks for your post.  It helped us to identify a NEW problem that is actually different from what you thought it was.  The good news is that the underlying problem that you have been reporting for a while actually has been fixed.  Starting in Release 5.9, Add Shares and Remove Shares transactions are included in the performance calculations at “market value” (based on the price history) as of the date the shares are added to or removed from the register.  (Acquisition Date of an Add Shares is not considered for this purpose, nor is the cost basis information that you enter on the form.) 

What we did uncover because of your post is that the Remove Shares transaction that is automatically created by the Transfer Shares operation has the wrong sign for the number of shares.  This does not affect the overall holdings and reporting, but it does impact the Performance calculations and is what is causing the problem that you are now seeing.  This will be fixed, and the transactions automatically corrected, in the next release.  In the meantime, there is a simple workaround.  Edit the Remove Shares transaction that was created by the Transfer Shares operation.  Temporarily change the number of shares and save the transaction.  Then go back and edit it again and restore the correct number of shares.  After you save it the second time, the error will be corrected and the IRR and ROI calculations will be accurate.

Note that the Add Shares transactions in the “Transfer to Account” do not have the same problem and you do not have to do anything to them.  Also, any manually-created Remove Shares transactions should be yielding accurate performance results.

Please try this out and let us know if it is working for you. 

Hi Eli,

Thanks very much for looking into this.  First of all your post was very helpful in explaining your algorithm for incorporating Remove Shares and Add Shares into the performance measures.  Your use of "market value (based on price history)" makes good sense for ROI and IRR calculations and explains why Add Shares acquisition date and cost basis do not matter.

Regarding my particular case, I starting using Remove and Add Shares sometime before release 5.9 - I started with Quicken Essentials back in the day for banking and then added my investment accounts when they were first supported by the modern Quicken product.  Therefore my ROI/IRR issue stemmed from before the Transfer capability was added in the last release.  Nonetheless, I tried your workaround to change the share count in Remove Shares and then restore it.  Voila!  This solved the issue and now my IRR and ROI performance measures are much more reasonable (now positive vs. negative).  I imagine this means that some aspect of my data file (for Remove Shares transactions) was incorrect and resetting the share count fixed it.  Will your upcoming fix review these transactions in the data file and ensure they are correct - either from potentially older Remove Shares transactions entered pre-5.9, as well as new ones resulting from Transfer Shares?

There is one cosmetic issue I would like to point out regarding Remove Shares.  If you initially acquired the shares in multiple lots, then the Remove Shares transaction has a "Specify Lots" button available.  However, in this case the Specify Lots dialog box shows a capital loss due to removal of the lots or portions of the lots - just like it would be for a $0 sale.  I wonder if this is really correct or whether you should be hiding the artificial loss information, or showing something else like cost basis and/or market value on removal.

Thanks again for addressing this and I look forward to the upcoming release.

Quicken Eli

@s2kdriver – 

Yes - the next release will eliminate the problem with using Transfer Shares and will fix up any existing transactions that were created by Transfer Shares.  Since my last post, I discovered that not ALL Transfer Shares were affected.  Specifically, if you used the “One Security” radio button, everything should be OK.  It is only when using the “All Securities” radio button that the Remove Shares was created incorrectly.

As far as your having problems with Remove Shares that were created before 5.9,  I am not aware of any problems.  Once we fixed the performance calculation logic in 5.9 to handle Add/Remove shares, all the existing cases that we tried worked correctly – there was no need to apply any “fixup” to existing transactions.

That is a good catch on the “Gain/Loss” column for Remove Shares (it also applies to Transfer Shares).  I can imagine times when the number might be useful, for example, if you are selecting shares to make a charitable contribution, but the label is not accurate.  I created an internal report to track the improvement.

Don Awalt

Thanks for all your work on this. I would like to mention, I have stopped using Mac and gone back to Quicken for Windows, mainly because of two big issues that I am surprised aren't being addressed - they seem to me to be bigger issues than some of the smaller features/items being addressed. I will keep tabs on the progress and hope to move to Mac one day if the problems can be addressed. The first is the lack of 'X' transactions - SoldX, for example, which in one transaction sells a stock and moves the money to another cash account, say a bank or money market. Not having this makes conversion of data from Windows virtually impossible to reconcile, and every day transactions are difficult to decipher if these kinds of transactions are done in real life. To take something that is a simple transaction in the real world and map it to two transactions is non-intuitive. 

The second problem is auto categorization does not work. I have my own list of categories that I used on the Windows side and I have refined over many years. I deleted the stock categories on Mac because I don't use them and I didn't want to see them suggested. So as a result, auto categories never works. Again, it's too much work every day when transactions are downloaded. I tried, and it just wore me out.

Both of these work perfectly on the Windows version, so someone at Quicken thought this was the right way to do things ;-)

Other than that, Mac is making good progress, thanks. I hope to rejoin the team someday.