Delete Obsolete "Required" Categories

Austin@

It would be great if it was possible to delete old, obsolete categories listed as "Required" that were once included in the default set of Quicken categories, but are either no longer are a default category in modern versions of Quicken or have been replaced by new, more specific versions of the same category. For example, when I first started using Quicken there was a default, required category called "Investments" with a subcategory called "ESPP Income." If I were to create a fresh, new Quicken file today, this subcategory would not exist. Rather, under "Investments" there are subcategories for "ESPP Self Income" and "ESPP Self Income (Spouse)". In addition, the new category of "Investments" with all of its subcategories only shows up when you are in an investment account.

The old, outdated "ESPP Income" subcategory is still hanging around and shows up in the category list for all accounts, whether they are investment accounts or not. And even though it is not included as a default category in Quicken now (and even though it is unused), it is still listed as "Required" (from earlier versions of Quicken) and as such cannot be deleted.

Please make it possible to remove these types of old, obsolete categories (as long as they are unused) or to have them be replaced/overwritten with the newer categories when selecting the "Add Default Categories" menu.

tmplee

In general, the categories ought to be able to be tailored any way one wants. I am annoyed, for instance, that there are a whole bunch of investment categories that I don't use and will never use!

NotACPA

"and will never use!"

You can predict the future ... WOW!!! What investment should I buy next?

jacobs

It certainly is possible for users to know they will never have Employee Stock options or ESPP Income for them or their spouse. And some investors might know they don't do the types of investing that would require Short Sell or Buy to Cover categories.

But let's not get too far afield from the original request, which was to be able to delete categories not required by current Quicken, which had been required -- yet are unused -- from an older version of Quicken. 

NotACPA

"It certainly is possible for users to know they will never have Employee Stock options or ESPP Income for them or their spouse."

And neither the user, nor their spouse will EVER change jobs so that the new job as these offered.

Again, telling the future ... AND rather depressing that they'll NEVER change jobs.

tmplee

@jacobs LOL. You essentially responded to @NotACPA the way I was about to. I am 75 and my wife and I are both retired. Neither of us is particularly interested in becoming employed again and because we've saved and invested enough we don't have to. And, yes, it is extremely unlikely we will ever trade options. (One of our stockbrokers uses my wife's portfolio as an example for his younger colleagues of how good an investment principal "buy and hold" is.) In any case, being able to hide, or even delete, categories you aren't using and don't expect to use shouldn't preclude being able to add them back in at a later date. I just looked and there are seven investment categories that we won't use and I don't understand why Buy/Sell (in various flavors) are categories at all — they are actions. But if they are going to have them as categories, where is IRA distribution as a category? (Don't refer me to the threads about IRA distributions. I found them and tried to understand them and couldn't make sense out of them on a first reading.)

jacobs

NotACPA said:

"It certainly is possible for users to know they will never have Employee Stock options or ESPP Income for them or their spouse."

And neither the user, nor their spouse will EVER change jobs so that the new job as these offered.

Again, telling the future ... AND rather depressing that they'll NEVER change jobs.

@NotACPA Umm, you have heard of this thing called retirement, haven't you, where some people cease working for the rest of their lives?

jacobs

I would not delete this idea. I can see no logical reason that Quicken users should not be able to delete categories which were required by older, defunct versions of the software but which are not required categories in the current software. I would guess the developers are probably not even aware this problem exists, and they will only become aware of it if this idea is passed to them.

DrumboyJim

I'm retired and many categories are irrelevant. I voted yes.

Austin@

I would also ask that this idea not be deleted. I created it out of frustration that I couldn't delete obsolete categories that were required at some point for Quicken to function, but have been replaced with new standard required categories, making the old ones useless, yet still unable to be deleted.

UKR

Worst case, you can always hide unneeded or unwanted built-in categories.

But, I also think that it should be possible for users to modify, repair or delete built-in categories.
If a situation arises where a built-in category was previously deleted or never created at all, but is now needed to correctly record a specific transaction, Quicken should be smart enough to add the missing category on the fly and then continue with the transaction.

There have been other discussions about the need to repair damaged built-in categories, e.g., _IntInc missing the tax attributes. This still is something that needs to be done, too.

jacobs

UKR said:

Worst case, you can always hide unneeded or unwanted built-in categories.

This is a Quicken Mac thread, and there is no way to hide and unhide categories in Quicken Mac. (There is a separate idea thread for that: click here to vote for functionality to allow categories to be hidden.) Nor a way to delete a required built-in category.

JayBugs

Adding a post to keep this alive. I've got lots of old 'required' categories due to a Windows import of data that are dups of the newer more well setup Mac categories...yet I can't merge them into the new categories and get rid of the old ones. Please fix this.

jacobs

@JayBugs  I'm glad you mentioned a related key point which I hope the developers will some day address: the inability currently to merge a non-required category into a required sub-category of Investments. I understand if there are some categories hard-wired to the tax report that they don't want users to delete, but there should be no reason to prevent users from merging a non-required category they created into a required one.

I, like many Quicken Mac users, migrated from Quicken 2007, which used a very different set of categories. So I have 18 investment categories from Quicken 2007, some used and some not used, and I'd like to merge those old categories (or at least those which were used) into the required investment categories used by Quicken Mac. But I can't. Category merges must be at the same level (e.g. category to category, sub-category to sub-category), so the first step to merge my old Quicken 2007 "•Realized Gain" category into modern Quicken Mac's category of Investments:Realized Gain/Loss, I would need to make them both sub-categories of Investments, and then merge them. But if I try to drag the old category into the Investment category, I'm blocked because "The 'Investments' category is used internally by Quicken and cannot be modified."

So I'm permanently stuck with duplicate investing categories, one set which came from Quicken 2007 and one set required by modern Quicken Mac.

JayBugs

Even more specifically, I’d like Quicken to k ow the old investment and other required categories from all earlier and alternative platform versions of quicken and have a single function to merge the old categories into the current matching Mac Quicken categories and then delete the old ones. Why should I need to manually figure out what matches and clean up all this even after Quicken allows deleting of old required categories?

Handling well of older (Q2007) and Windows file import should be better. I have all these _Div and _Foo categories from...who knows when or which version. (My Quicken file started in the 90s...)

Wuhrman

I'll add my agreement to most of the above. I've been using Quicken since the 1990s, upgrading from time to time, cleaning out older transactions from time to time, but essentially using the same file (because of the custom categories I've made up). One day, I "tested" what a download from a payroll tax program would look like, and it added a whole host of tax and other deduction categories that I've never used and never been able to get rid of. And that's something like 20 YEARS. Shouldn't be any block to my deleting them.

Paul13

This merge non required category into required category needs to be addressed. It is very annoying to long time quicken users who moved to qmac.

jacobs

This Idea post needs more votes if it is to be pushed in front of the developers for consideration. The current vote total (15 as of this writing) is not high enough for this to be sent to the developers. If you're reading this and wish you could delete old required categories from a prior version of Quicken, or merge them with the current required categories in Quicken, please scroll to the top of this page, locate the yellow box under the first post, and click the arrow to add your vote.

tmplee

I have to chuckle. I couldn't remember whether I'd voted or not, so I went to vote and the count went from 15 to 14! I assume that's because if you've already voted and try to vote again it interprets that as meaning you changed your mind or voted by accident. Anyway, I "voted again" and restored the vote that presumably I'd already made.

jacobs

@tmplee  Yes, exactly! The way to tell if you've voted is the shade of the arrow: dark gray means you haven't voted, light grey (as in "greyed out" means you have voted) --but if you're not sure, do as you did and click the arrow; if the vote total goes up, all's well, but if it goes down just click it again to restore your vote. Although it's not Quicken's fault, this platform (Vanilla) has some really stupid interface design elements!

roisenp1950

QMac Version 6.8.2 (Build 608.44865.100) Investments have a lot of "Required" categories under Investments. They are NOT deletable.
Up until I created a "Taxable IRA Withdrawl" category. When I click on it is shows which IRA form it is realated to. This shows up as REQUIRED categories now. But it is DELETABLE. I did not give it the "Required" designation and I have no idea where it came from but the fact that is deletable appears to go against the normal expectation I have gathered from QMac use way back from 2007 verion. The tech I spoke to was mistified. Any ideas? Not a huge issue by any means but I do not like it when I do not understand the "rules" surrounding "Required" categories.

jacobs

I see this, too. But if you have a category called Personal Income:Taxable IRA Withdrawal, this is not a category you created; it's a Quicken-created category. I verified this by creating a new, blank Quicken file with no transactions, and this category is present. I have no idea why it is labeled as Required yet lets you delete it. 

Shelster

As a QMac user since the late 1980's, I've inherited an evolving set of categories. Some categories may be irrelevant, some may be obsolete, and some are actually useful. It would be nice to at least be able to (at least) HIDE required subcats (e.g., ESPP-related).

Currently, when I try to assign any Investments subcat, it seems that Investments:ESPP Income is the ONLY one I can assign. When I type out "Investments:Interest Expense," it doesn't give an error, but nor does the category change after I commit the change. I renamed the "Interest Expense" top-level category and tried to change a transaction with that category. No joy.

jacobs

You cannot touch — delete, merge, rename or hide — the 29 "Required" sub-categories of the Investments category. These are hard-wired throughout the program code, from the Portfolio to dashboard to reports. You also can't use these categories for banking-type transactions where you manually select a category, because doing so would mess up Quicken's internal calculations.

You wrote about entering interest expense, though. Investments is an income category, so all the sub-categories are also income. (With the exception of the Investments category controlled by Quicken, sub-categories are always the same income/expense type as the parent category.) If you have interest expense to enter, you can use the default Home:Mortgage Interest or Loans:Loan Interest categories — or your can create your own.

Boatnmaniac

IMO, most default categories should not be user deletable. Those categories are linked to other tax tools (such as Tax Planner and, perhaps the Lifetime Planner) and various tax reports in Quicken. Deleting those categories could significantly compromise the effectiveness and usefulness of these reports and tools.

So, I cannot support this requested product improvement idea….at least not until it can be proven that there will be no adverse effect on other Quicken features. Instead, we already have the option to hide unused categories which will have the same effect of "decluttering" without possibly adversely affecting other product features.

jacobs

@Boatnmaniac This is a Quicken Mac thread, and in Quicken Mac, hiding categories is a recently-released feature — but users cannot hide the 29 Required sub-categories of Investing. So in this one category, it's not possible to "declutter" by removing, merging or hiding the sub-categories, as is possible with other categories. I don't find an urgent need to be able to hide these categories. I know with certainty that I will never have Employee Stock Option or ESPP Income transactions, for instance, but it doesn't bother me that those sub-categories exist and can't be hidden.

I think many of us who have used Quicken for a long time — and especially those who have gone through migrations such as Quicken Windows to Quicken Mac, or Quicken Mac 2007 to modern Quicken Mac — accumulated a lot of categories used by the prior versions of the program. Fortunately, most of those can easily be deleted, merged with other default categories for the same purpose, or hidden, to reduce the clutter. I recently did something I had intended to do for a few years and cleaned up my category list; I went from 360 to 170, of which I have about 20 now hidden!

Boatnmaniac

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20428429#Comment_20428429

Sorry, I didn't catch that this is a QMac thread. Thanks for bringing it to my attention and explaining the QMac situation.

But I still think that regardless of whether this is a QMac or QWin subject, there are some user-requested user changes that can have adverse effect on the usability and functionality of the program. IMO, this request to be able to delete the default Investment categories/sub-categories might just fall into that arena.

I would love to see some statement from Quicken that deleting these types of categories and subcategories can be done safely and if they would do that I will happily change my position on this matter.

In the meantime, I think changing this requested change to simply add the ability to hide the 29 required investing sub-categories, I would readily add my vote to it because hiding a category or subcategory is something that is very easily reversible with a simple click so no permanent harm can be done by it. And hiding would have the same "decluttering" effect that deleting does. It seems to me that would be the path to take.

Shelster

@jacobs and @Boatnmaniac I think the answer is to provide a UI "delete" option but to store the "yes" as False in the "display" table. I'm having a hard time envisioning a noticeable performance impact of having even a few thousand extra category records in a "display" table consisting of a key and a single field of boolean values. After these last few months of QuickenConnect hell, I'm all for not changing data storage and feeds any more than necessary.

jacobs

@Shelster It's a relational database, so the number of categories should not noticeably affect performance anywhere in the program, whether one has 200 or 2,000 categories. (Hopefully people don't have a few thousand categories!)

It would be nice if they made some or all Investing sub-categories hideable. But since it's only this one pocket of 29 subcategories that's an issue here, I really don't see it as much of an issue if they remain visible and unhidable. There are dozens of higher priorities I could name which should be higher on the developers' priority list! 😉

Shelster

@jacobs that is why I made the absurd reference to having 1000's of categories.

I'd enjoy discussing "this pocket of 29" offline with you. What I know is that my ONLY available menu subcategory for Investments is ESPP, which is irrelevant at this point. For every other subset I have to create a new category and remap the tax lines. And yet the "right" subset shows up in other places. I just can't choose it from a menu.

jacobs

What I know is that my ONLY available menu subcategory for Investments is ESPP, which is irrelevant at this point…And yet the "right" subset shows up in other places. I just can't choose it from a menu.

Yes, and that's by design. These required categories are tied to lots of the internal calculations Quicken does for investment performance, tax reports, etc. which are based on Buy, Sell, Reinvest and other investment transactions. Quicken can't allow you to manually create transactions using these special categories without messing up its ability to perform the required calculations. So it makes sense that you can't select these categories on banking-type categorize transactions. (I don't know why ESPP behaves differently; I've never looked into it.)

I guess the question I have is why you have to create your own categories for any of these existing investment categories? One obvious one is interest income, because that can come from both banking accounts and investment accounts. What other investing accounts are you creating in duplicate?