How to use tags

benzab

In Q 2007 I have a savings account which is broken down by classes, ie new car fund, new computer fund, etc.. Can I do the same in Q 2018 using tags? Thank you for your help.

smayer97

If you did not use sub-classes, you can do exactly the same. Tags are equivalent to Classes. There is no equivalent to subclasses. The key difference between classes and tags is that you can actually assign multiple tags to a single transaction. Of course, you need to be careful if you do this to not have double counting when generating reports.

Report formatting is less robust and flexible in "modern" QMac, so you will have to experiment to see if it meets your needs. That said, there is a cross-tabular report format in the current version of QMac (similar to the Job/Project report format in QM2007) that you can try.

smayer97

If you did not use sub-classes, you can do exactly the same. Tags are equivalent to Classes. There is no equivalent to subclasses. The key difference between classes and tags is that you can actually assign multiple tags to a single transaction. Of course, you need to be careful if you do this to not have double counting when generating reports.

Report formatting is less robust and flexible in "modern" QMac, so you will have to experiment to see if it meets your needs. That said, there is a cross-tabular report format in the current version of QMac (similar to the Job/Project report format in QM2007) that you can try.

William McLachlan

In the current or future Quickens (for mac, but I suppose for either platform) is it possible or CAN it be possible to simply exclude tags from reports when one wants to? I need to use tags for organization and searching and such in sometimes in reports, but end up removing all the tags from various large groups of transactions for some types of reports I need to share with my accountant or others because I can't just turn them off to prevent the extra sub-sections from appearing on reports and confusing everyone.

Consider this a feature request I suppose - just let us turn tags OFF in reports and save that type of report, or turn them back on using the usual two options in the tags tab of the report customization dialog. Seems pretty simple.

jacobs

@William McLachlan What report are you using? I'm not sure I understand what you want to be able to do that you can't currently do. Tags don't affect reports unless you create a report sorted on tags. For instance, if you do New Report, Transaction, Rows=Category, you get a report sorted by categories. Click on Columns and add the Tags column to the report to see the tags, but it isn't sorted by tags. 

William McLachlan

this is interesting. When I do a new report of the type transaction or summary, I get a toolbar just above the report with customize, print, export, delete, and new window as options. When I open this existing report I've had and been refining for many years (and consequently has followed me up to many versions of Quicken), I don't get that toolbar, or any way anywhere to eliminate the tags column. I've had the report so long I'm not even sure what kind of report it originated at, but it's arranged in a "money in" and "money out" fashion, and allows me to include or exclude accounts, and include or exclude categories, and it produces the type of report my tax accountant wants from me and it's been fine for years. However as I said, there are NO controls for what columns are included. This report has the upper right "export csv..." and "customize" buttons, and the customize button yields a dialog box with tabs for Accounts, Categories, Tags, and Payees. The "Tags" tab only has two options which are "include transactions with any or no tag" (well of course...that would be the default!), and "include only transactions with <<any or all...pulldown menu>> of the selected tags" where presumably one would select a group of tags to limit to.

But...there's nowhere with this report, which I want to keep and keep using, to just NOT display tags at all. And if a group of transactions have a category like say "pet food", and some transactions are tagged "cat" and others tagged "dog", and yet others aren't tagged at all, the report simply looks weird and has extra headings that count overlapping totals. I realize it probably should work that way, but it should only work that way WHEN TAGS ARE VISIBLE. It seems very simple to me - turn on the tags column in reports to let the reports do what they do now with the overlapping subtotals rather than exclusionary subtotals (if a transaction can have more than one tag, then by definition it has to be totaled in more than one sub total...), or turn them OFF to let the reports NOT cross-pollinate subtotals as intersecting groups of categories or tags. A dollar can't exist in more than one category, but a dollar can exist in more than one tag. That's fine with me for searching and analyzing and OTHER types of reports...but for the report I've been using for tax accountants and business affairs for ages now? I just want to turn the tags column OFF.

William McLachlan

Okay I know more now. When one starts with the pre-built "Category Summary" report as provided in the lowest panel of the reports drop-down menu in the accounts window, there's no way to turn off tags and turn off overlapping subtotalling under category headers. So in my other example if I have a category called "petfood" that totals $40.00 from two sub:categories called petfood:dog and petfood:cat that each total $20.00, but one of the pet food:cat entries for $5.00 is tagged "online" and none of the other transactions are tagged, I get this extra child total "online" under the parent total "petfood" and equally indented as the actual child categories pet food:dog and petfood:cat and when reading the report it looks as if the total has somehow not included that tag-generated sub-entry. I hate it. I just want to turn tags off. I still might want to search by tags for other reports or other research so I want the tag to be there, but I don't want it given this seemingly equal weight in the layout of Category Summary reports if I were to just HIDE the tags altogether in the Category Summary report.

That's what I think it should do. Somebody...please add a button to that "tags" customizing tab that's something like "hide tags and tag subtotals in this report".

Thank you for attending my Ted Talk.

jacobs

You've stumbled into the messy area of different generation of reports. The reports on the Reports menu below "New Report" are the "old reports". These are reports that came from the 2010-era Quicken Essentials for Mac, which had the original code the current Quicken Mac was derived from. After Quicken Mac debuted in 2015, it was clear that the old reports engine was to adequate for the flexibility users needed to customize their reports.

After dealing with some more significant shortcomings in the early iterations of the program, the developers set out to build a completely new reports engine which would allow much more customization and user control over formatting of reports. We started seeing the results of that work in Quicken 2017, with the debut of "New Report". Over the ensuing two years, they have been adding functionality to the New Report reports. At some point, when the new reports engine can generate equivalents of all the old reports, they will likely remove the old reports entirely. But until then the program is in an odd area with these two different sets of reports, and this explanation I've given isn't apparent to users.

It is highly unlikely they will make enhancements to the old reports, because they are on their way out the door. Category Summary, particularly, can be replicated by the new reports engine, so I think it's very unlikely they will make any changes to it. (There's at least one bug users have reported with Category Summary omitting data in some cases which has not been fixed because Category Summary is likely going to be removed from the program at some point.)

Your solution is to re-create the report you want using New Report. It does not do the subtotaling that you describe, and you can show or hide hags at the click of a button. I encourage anyone who has created reports using the old Category Summary to explore the much-improved world of New Report, and re-create any reports you need.