Reporting - Quicken Deluxe 2019 for Mac

MFP

Upgraded from Quicken 2007 for Mac to Deluxe 2019 for Mac and find the reporting extremely limited compared to 2007.

I enter and track all my payments in Quicken (using 2 different checking accounts) and then print a report for a given time period to enter payments using my banks online bill pay. The report is sorted by checking account and then by payee with a subtotal by account. It shows the payee and check amount on one line.

Cannot find a way to create a similar report with 2019 for Mac. The closest thing I can find is to select the payments in an account and print the selected transactions. Unfortunately it prints the category detail and splits.

Does anyone know a way to just print a line with the payee and payment amount on one line without the transaction detail?

jacobs

I'm not sure I exactly understand your Quicken 2007 report, but I'll take a stab at it. If you want a report with one amount for Payee, then how about this:

Reports > New Report
Summary
Rows = Payee
Columns = Account
Click Create Report
Click Customize
Set desired date range
Select which accounts to include (if you only want selected ones)
Click OK

This will give you a report with one line for each Payee, a total for each payee for your selected time period, with subtotals by account.

How does that match up with what you're looking for?

jacobs

I'm not sure I exactly understand your Quicken 2007 report, but I'll take a stab at it. If you want a report with one amount for Payee, then how about this:

Reports > New Report
Summary
Rows = Payee
Columns = Account
Click Create Report
Click Customize
Set desired date range
Select which accounts to include (if you only want selected ones)
Click OK

This will give you a report with one line for each Payee, a total for each payee for your selected time period, with subtotals by account.

How does that match up with what you're looking for?

smayer97

I'm actually reading it as a 2 level sort transaction detail report... (I use these 2-level sort reports all the time):

- sort by account then then sort by Payee and subtotal each account.

QM2007 can easily do this. Can you do this in the New Report > Transaction Details?

MFP

Jacobs,

Thank you for your input, using the defaults it only showed the interest portion of a loan payment. I selected all categories and then it did the job.

Thanks again for your help.

jacobs

@smayer97 Doing it as I described creates a columnar report with Payees as rows and Accounts as columns. The total for each Payee are the right-most column; the total for each account is the last row. Here's a small sample:



So it gives you totals by Payee per account, but it's in columnar form instead of one account after the other. I think this addresses what you want.

If you actually wanted to have the same Payee listed multiple times, once for each Account, the only way I can think of to do that is to create a different Payee report for each Account.

smayer97

@jacobs thx but a columnar report is strictly a SUMMARY report. BTW, what I use is a similar Report FORMAT as the OP but NOT the same choices for the format. My emphasis was the need for a TRANSACTIONAL DETAIL report doing a 2-LEVEL SORT and SUBTOTAL.... a very commonly used format in QM2007. (In my case an example is Subtotal by Category and sort by date)

So in QM2007, you specify (as would apply to the OP crireria) Subtotal by Account and sorted by Payee. Cannot post a screen shot but it would look something like:

Account 1:
Date:          Payee          Amount
1/1/19        payee1              50
3/2/19        payee1              29.99
5/3/19        payee1              14
1/1/19        payee 2             10
2/5/19        payee 2              25
3/2/19        payee 2              35
Total Account 1:                   163.99

Account 2:
Date:          Payee          Amount
1/1/19        payee1              30
3/2/19        payee1              10
5/3/19        payee2              15
1/1/19        payee 2             10
2/5/19        payee 3              25
3/2/19        payee 3              35
Total Account 1:                125

Net:                                   288.99

I have captured the selection criteria in the Useful Transactional Detail report as

• SubTotals on reports (creates first level sort)
• More Sorting Options to Reports (creates 2nd level sort)
  

Combined is what gives the 2-level sort capability from the same criteria selection window in QM2007. Any combination of the 2 selection criteria can be used!

Is that what QMac offers? If not, that is a BIG gap! 

@MFP, did you achieve what you wanted using the SUMMARY report format or the DETAIL format?

jacobs

@smayer97 We're probably getting a bit far afield from the original user's post, at least unless/until the OP returns and indicates if this was on the right track or not. Just to clarify for you, though, I read this line...

Unfortunately it prints the category detail and splits

as a request to not have that detail, and and this one…

It shows the payee and check amount on one line.

and this one…

Does anyone know a way to just print a line with the payee and payment amount on one line without the transaction detail?

... as a request to not show the transaction detail, just a single line for each Payee. That's why I described how to do it with a Summary report.

In you example above, you want transactional detail, which is different. There is not a way to specify "Subtotal by" as there was in Quicken 2007, but... 

In your example, you're getting subtotals by account, but not by Payee. (OP wanted a total for each Payee, which your example doesn't provide.) What you show above, though, is easy to do in Quicken Mac. You do New Report > Transaction, Rows=Account, and then in the resulting report screen, click the Payee heading to sort by Payee within Account. Here's an example; it's real data which I exported to Excel just to anonymize the Account and Payee names...


Unfortunately, just as it puts subtotals on top (which I hate), it also does the secondary sort by date from latest to oldest, where I'd always prefer the opposite for a financial report. But otherwise, I think this is exactly what you have in your example above.

smayer97

@jacobs thanks for clarifying the features of the Transaction Detail report. Too bad about controlling the sort order. 

Again, not getting far afield, as I am trying to provide a solution as I interpreted what the OP was after. I may have missed the last sentence so I interpreted the rest as meaning to get rid of the split details and category...also because I was influenced by the part you captured in your second quote... the only way to show the cheque amount for a payee is to use transactional detail, unless there is only ever one cheque per payee per account in a given period. So I saw this as achievable with what I presented. Maybe the OP will clarify. 

MFP

Jacobs / smayer97

Thank you again, I am all set using the summary report.

MFP

smayer97

I agree with you that reporting is far superior with Quicken 2007 for Mac. It is too bad that the new Quicken for Mac is not as good as a 12 year old version. I've followed some threads and don't understand why the reporting capabilities are not made more robust

The only reason I upgraded is to stay current with Mac OS X. I try to stay with in 2 to 3 versions of the current OS or it seems other functional and security issues start to affect performance. It's too bad backward compatibility is not as important as it used to be. I sometimes wonder if there is some collusion between Microsoft and Apple with Adobe and the like.

jacobs

MFP said:

I agree with you that reporting is far superior with Quicken 2007 for Mac. It is too bad that the new Quicken for Mac is not as good as a 12 year old version. I've followed some threads and don't understand why the reporting capabilities are not made more robust.

@MFP There's a long, messy story behind the development of Quicken Mac.

After the developers realized in 2006 that they faced an eventual dead end with some of the 20 year-old technologies that were used in the Mac product at that time, they decided they had no choice but to start over with all-new code that used the latest Apple frameworks for the modern Mac operating system.

They first tried to create a very reimagined financial management software called Quicken Financial Life -- which never made it out of beta testing.After more time in development building a more traditional approach to Quicken, the developers were still a long way from the finish line when a new chief executive decided they should release a subset of Quicken which would meet the needs of at least some users who didn't need to track their investments: Quicken Essentials came out in 2010 and was roundly criticized as inadequate for many Quicken users. The head of Quicken under former parent company Intuit said they'd have a full-featured Quicken Deluxe ready to come to market within a year -- and shortly thereafter he left and there was more management turmoil at Intuit. Mac development ground to a halt for a couple years.

Finally, Intuit decided they should commit to building out a full Quicken Mac -- but they allocated money for only a handful of developers. From 2012 to 2014, the small team worked to modernize some of the core code in Essentials, which again needed changes to keep up with macOS, and to add investing functionality. Quicken Mac 2015 launched in fall 2014 as a modernized and expanded version of Essentials -- but it still lacked many of the features in Quicken 2007 or Quicken Windows. The reports were simply carried over from the bare-bones Quicken Essentials. Quicken management acknowledged it wouldn't yet meet the needs of all users, but promised to continue adding features as quickly as they could.

Over the past 5 years since the start of the modern Quicken Mac, the development team has worked to add key functionality to the program. Since Quicken became independent of Intuit 3 years ago, the size of the Mac development team has supposedly doubled. But it's still a fairly small team, and combined with the complexity of the Quicken code and data structure, forward progress has been steady but slow.  

The reporting capabilities are slowly becoming more robust. If you look at Quicken 2019 today versus Quicken 2015, things are a whole lot better. Because the Essentials-era reports used a funky HTML-based design, it required starting over to build a new reports interface and engine to deliver the type of flexibility users have been clamoring for. The first iteration of the "New Report" engine surfaced in Quicken 2017, and it's been evolving over the past three years. For instance, the columnar-style reports discussed above just got added in January of this year, and more expansion of and enhancement to reports have been promised.

The good thing, I think, is that the developers have understood all along that users want and need powerful and flexible reporting; they've just had limits on how much they can deliver how quickly. We all -- and that includes the developers and Quicken management -- wish the development process was faster, but for some reasons we can infer and others we're not privy to, it's not. As the product manager has said repeatedly, Quicken is complex. Even today, the re-written code really consists of modules of code for different aspects of the program which have been written in different eras of development, using development tools that change over time. And we can guess that the size of the development team is in large part a function of how much revenue Quicken generates, and that there's not enough revenue to continue to significantly expand the development team. I think with each passing year, we'll continue to see significant improvements in Quicken Mac's reporting capabilities. that's the good news for those of us who hope to keep using Quicken of the long run. But the bad news is that it's still problem that the reports today still lack flexibility or capabilities some users need.

I hope that helps offer some explanation about how we got where we are today, and why, as you note, the reports and some other features of Quicken 2019 are not as good as its 12 year-old predecessor.