Category Summary Differences (Q Mac)

Question

I'm seeing different totals for Money Out depending on whether I've selected "Included transactions from any account" or "Include only transactions from selected accounts". I'm struggling with identifying how the difference in totals is calculated.

jacobs · Accepted Answer

An update sometime late last year introduced a problem that causes data to sometimes be omitted with the old Category Summary report. Fortunately, there is an easy -- and better -- way around it: New Reports.

Short background: Quicken Mac evolved from a 2010-era program called Quicken Essentials for Macintosh, which was the start of re-writing Quicken for the modern macOS. In 2014, Quicken Mac hit the market, solving some of the shortcomings of Quicken Essentials, while still leaving many (many!) desired features incomplete or not tackled. Reports was an area that carried over for Essentials, but it lacked much of the customization capabilities users needed. Starting two years ago, the developers set out to write an all-new reports engine for Quicken Mac which had the architecture to add the functionality users were asking for. A lot of features have been added over two years, but we're still in the middle of the transition from the old reports to the new reports, and both exist side-by-side in the program currently. Eventually, the developers will remove the old Essentials-era reports.

Currently, all the functionality of the new reports engine is hidden in a single menu command: New Report on the reports menu. Unfortunately, there's no clue to users that this command is different than the old reports which appear under it on the menu, nor the power that it unlocks. (Expect to see the developers make this more apparent and easier to dive into in the next update or two.)

So... select New Report from the menu. If you want to replicate the old Category Summary report, select Transaction, then select Rows=Category, and click Create Report. Then click Customize and set the date range to what you want; you can also further tweak the report, if you wish, to be limited to selected Accounts, Categories, Tags or Payees. In the report window, you can add or hide columns by clicking on Columns, and you can re-arrange or re-size columns by dragging on the column headers. Most important, you'll find all your data in the report!

I wish I could explain why the developers have left the Category Summary report with its bugs. I suspect they don't want to invest time into fixing bugs in a report that's soon going to be eliminated from the program -- but in the meantime the report produced incorrect results for some users, as you've fortunately discovered (and some users probably haven't). They should have fixed it or eliminated it by now. But now you know how to avoid the problems by using the new reports engine.