Quicken for Mac v5.12 Released

jacobs

The latest Mac upgrade was beta tested for several months. Sometimes problems appear after the update has been released because the universe of beta testers doesn't have the same financial accounts or configurations as the larger universe of all Quicken users. But often there are unrelated problems which occur in close proximity to a software update.

Several connectivity problems are happening due to financial institutions blocking connections or making changes, which have nothing to do with the recent update to Quicken Mac. For instance, read this alert about Chase connectivity problems. There are multiple reports about problems with Amex affecting people now; this started after the latest upgrade came out, so is unlikely to be related to the update.

All the connectivity problems with Quicken are certainly problematic; it's really the biggest problem with Quicken in my opinion. But almost all of these are caused not by updates to Quicken but by financial institutions temporarily turning off download access while they make security changes or implementing changes without advance notice to Quicken. For any of your accounts which offer Direct Connect, it's usually worth switching because that connection method typically has fewer issues (although financial institutions can turn off access for direct connect at times). 

Matthew Caswell

I decided to do the 15.12.3 update since I have all day to go back to the prior working version if I need to. I can now edit the date and amount in the register for scheduled bills, but why isn't there a simple button to transmit it to my bank or am I missing it? The right click pay now option is grayed out.

I really miss the simplicity of Q2007 but that version had years to get the bugs out and make it user friendly.

Shing

> @jacobs said:
> The latest Mac upgrade was beta tested for several months. Sometimes problems appear after the update has been released because the universe of beta testers doesn't have the same financial accounts or configurations as the larger universe of all Quicken users. But often there are unrelated problems which occur in close proximity to a software update.
>
> Several connectivity problems are happening due to financial institutions blocking connections or making changes, which have nothing to do with the recent update to Quicken Mac. For instance, read this alert about Chase connectivity problems. There are multiple reports about problems with Amex affecting people now; this started after the latest upgrade came out, so is unlikely to be related to the update.
>
> All the connectivity problems with Quicken are certainly problematic; it's really the biggest problem with Quicken in my opinion. But almost all of these are caused not by updates to Quicken but by financial institutions temporarily turning off download access while they make security changes or implementing changes without advance notice to Quicken. For any of your accounts which offer Direct Connect, it's usually worth switching because that connection method typically has fewer issues (although financial institutions can turn off access for direct connect at times). 

I agree with this assessment. I have Discover and Chase and have not seen any problems now or during beta testing. I use Quicken Connect for both.

Frustratedd

I "upgraded" to version 5.12.3 on Friday and immediately started receiving the following notification dozens of times when I open, or take any action within Quicken.

"The file "data" couldn't be opened because it isn't in the correct format. The file might be corrupted, truncated, or in an unexpected format."

The only action I have taken was the update to 5.12.3 and now I can't use the software without clicking this dialog box away dozens of times. Aside from the annoyance of having to click this away to use the application, it doesn't exactly generate trust in the newest version when this is the first thing I see.

Please help!

jacobs

@FrustratedW/Quicken I know this is probably of little comfort, but what you describe isn't something we've seen other reports of, so it seems something unique went wrong in your case. 

I would first try repeating the update to version 5.12 on your data file. To do this, you'll want to grab the backup just prior to the update -- Quicken automatically generates one, if you don't have one. (If you don't know where Quicken backups live, write back.) Make a copy of the backup (always leave backups untouched, in case you need to go back to them again), and then drag it onto the Quicken app icon in your Dock or Applications folder. This will again trigger Quicken to make a backup and then update the database to the 5.12 version. One of two things is likely to be the case after the update: (1) everything looks fine and works as expected, or (2) you have the same problem you describe above. If (2), then I would repeat this sequence one more time using a slightly older backup from a week or two ago. If you're still stuck, write back and we can discuss steps to take from there.

Editing to add: If you don't want to engage in this back-and-forth on the forum, you also could contact Quicken Support; I recommend phone support during they open hours during the week.

jacobs

@Quicken Marcus If you're still following this thread, I would call your attention to a possible problem users with several different investment brokerages are reporting with reinvested dividends: here and here and here and here. One such report might indicate a problem with a particular brokerage, but multiple such reports, bolstered by confirmation the same transactions work correctly with Quicken Windows, suggests there might be a problem with Quicken Mac.

dave9913

according to barclay it will be working by 11:59 pm eastern sept 8, they
are upgrading the system

Quicken Marcus

Tomi said:

Latest QMac Update hosed up the budgets in my file during the conversion from v5.11. Not only did it change the starting month of my budget from January to October, it completely reversed my budgeted category selections. Now all the "unbudgeted categories" are selected and previously budgeted categories are unselected. I really don't want to have to recreate a complete year's budget and lose everything I had. Is there a way to fix the date default and budget issues in this version. [v5.12.3 (Build 512.29258.100)]

Tomi, we didn't make any changes to budgets that I'm aware of so I'm not sure why you're running into these issues but let me reach out to you directly to see if we can get you fixed up and learn what happened.

Quicken Marcus

jacobs said:

@MikeP No, the functionality is there. First you enter the transaction details, and then on the next screen you schedule it. You need to click the triangle next to Start Date, and then you'll see a place to enter an optional End, either by date or number of occurrences.



@Quicken Marcus You might re-consider how many fields have been hidden in the two screens for creating a scheduled transaction. In the case of this one above, as well as need to click to open up Tags & Memos, and the workaround needed to enter a Transfer, I'd question the design of these screens. At worst, users are confused because they don't know where to find something they need to enter; even at best, it requires multiple extra clicks to open hidden areas. I am guessing the reason for hiding some information was to avoid overwhelming users with too much information, but I think it would be better to show all the fields than to require users to discover and open them with additional clicking.

Quicken will remember whether you use these extra features or not so it won't be multiple clicks.  We are hiding things initially that aren't used that often because many people find Quicken overwhelming especially new users.  With the old scheduling user interface, we heard many customers ask us why we couldn't just make it like the Mac Calendar.  This was our goal with the new re-design.  Any change is hard.

Quicken Marcus

jacobs said:

@Quicken Marcus If you're still following this thread, I would call your attention to a possible problem users with several different investment brokerages are reporting with reinvested dividends: here and here and here and here. One such report might indicate a problem with a particular brokerage, but multiple such reports, bolstered by confirmation the same transactions work correctly with Quicken Windows, suggests there might be a problem with Quicken Mac.

Jacobs, thanks.  Yes, we have identified the problem and have a fix coming.  It appears our fix for one dividend issue created another one that appears to only occur when the same data is downloaded twice from the brokerage.

Quicken Marcus

Matthew Caswell said:

I decided to do the 15.12.3 update since I have all day to go back to the prior working version if I need to. I can now edit the date and amount in the register for scheduled bills, but why isn't there a simple button to transmit it to my bank or am I missing it? The right click pay now option is grayed out.

I really miss the simplicity of Q2007 but that version had years to get the bugs out and make it user friendly.

Matthew, can you provide a screenshot of what you're seeing.  On the schuedled transaction instance, there should be a Pay Now button. See below. 
Maybe something isn't quite set up correctly or you're selecting a different transaction.  The Pay Now should be available if you're selecting a transaction with a Bill Pay transaction.

Quicken Marcus

smsadler said:

The latest update has created connectivity issues for Barclay Card, Discover, American Express and Chase for me. I am very frustrated that the update was not beta tested more thoroughly.

I'm not sure about the Barclay Card but Discover, American Express and Chase have nothing to do with the update.  I believe Chase had an outage, American Express changed the way Quicken connects to it a couple of weeks ago so you'll need to do a Disconnect and Reconnect to get it working again and Discover is in the process of changing the way Quicken connects to it.  More information to come as we work with them to figure out the best way to proceed.

Quicken Marcus

jacobs said:

@Quicken Marcus So Quicken 2007 converters have basically no path forward to ever get their categorizations to work? I thought that Quicken 2019 would use one of its default categories, and if the user changed it to one of their old Quicken 2007 categories, then on the next download for the same Payee, Quicken would use the category of the most recent transaction, even if that was a Quicken 2007 category. So user would basically need to "correct" Quicken's auto-categorization once, and then Quicken would use that saved categorization going forward. Are you saying this isn't the case?

No, that's what I'm saying.  If you make a transaction edit, Quicken will remember the last category you used for a particular payee so you shouldn't have to categorize or memorize that pairing.  My only point is that I suspect the people who are seeing the issue where this doesn't work might be 2007 users.  Again, we have no idea because we have not been able to reproduce this reliably in-house so we aren't able to investigate. I do know the only person who's told me he's seen this issue before is our head of testing and he converted his personal Quicken file from 2007 years ago so that's a data point of one.

Related question… This would be tedious, but would it work to merge a Quicken 2007 category into a Quicken 2019 category, then rename that Quicken 2019 category to the old Quicken 2007 name? Again, it would be tedious to do this for 50 or 75 categories, but most users probably don't have that many custom categories -- and even it they did, they might be willing to invest the time to do the merge + rename if that meant their transactions would then auto-categorize correctly in th future. So I'm just wondering if you can confirm whether that process would work?

I'm not sure if that would work because I don't know if the category ID gets merged or not.  At this stage, I think it's best to wait for memorized transaction/quickfill functionality which we're working on but I don't ha,ve a release date yet.

Can you also clarify the sequence or hierarchy of auto-categorization processes currently:

a) If a user downloads a transaction for a Payee which exists, Quicken should use the category used for the most-recent transaction for this Payee. (although we believe this is broken in some or all instances for some or all users)
b) If a downloaded Payee doesn't exist, if the preference is set for auto-categorization, Quicken should use it's server-based matching to try to guess a category; if that preference is turned off, no attempt is made to auto-categorize.

Thanks for helping us understand how it works (or how it should work).

First, categorization is not broken for "All" customers. It may be broken for a few but it is working for the vast majority of people. Remember, the forums are heavily skewed because you only see comments from people who have problems so even 10 people commenting can feel like a lot of people from the forum perspective. This means that even an issue that affects only .000001% of customers can "feel" like a major issue in the forums.  That's not to say these issues are not important to address. I'm just saying we need to keep things in perspective.

In terms of categorization sequence, it's complicated and changing even as I write this but in general, the Quicken Cloud auto-categorizes everything first and this includes using synced renaming rules and memorized transactions. As we know, Quicken Mac today only allows for 1 memorized transaction and this is the last transaction edited and Quicken Mac does NOT sync this to the cloud. After this, Quicken Mac downloads transactions from the Quicken Cloud decides what parts of the transaction will be added, changed or merged with local transactions if a local transaction exists.  If a user changed the category for a particular payee in the past, Quicken remembers this and applies it the next time this payee is downloaded.  So for example, If you change Amazon to Grocery in the last Amazon transaction, then, unfortunately, the next time an Amazon transaction is downloaded it will get the Grocery category.  Today, Quicken always applies the last category a user assigned to a payee whether it makes sense or not and this won't change with memorized transactions. The memorized transaction feature works the same way. The difference is with memorized transactions, you'll be able to save more than one payee/categorization pair, giving you a choice to choose from when trying to change the payee or category.

jacobs

@Quicken Marcus Thanks for the responses. In terms of categorization, I do understand it's working for some users, but there are an unusually large number of users complaining about it not working here; there are more comments about this not working than anything else in Quicken Mac. I don't know if you saw the list I compiled for you on a previous page of this thread of users complaining about this issue, but all of them say Quicken is not using the category of the previous instance of the same Payee. You say above that "today, Quicken always applies the last category a user assigned to a payee whether it makes sense or not" -- but there are a bunch of users saying that's not what they are experiencing.

Here's one recent quote which encapsulates the frustration many users are experiencing from operation that is not as you describe:

Quicken can see literally dozens of entries with [the same] statement payee name. It can see that EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. I rename it and set a category. When it downloads a new statement entry, where in the world is it coming up with this bogus category? How can I make it stop wasting my time?

I do believe this did used to work the way you describe, but was broken for some users in a previous update. (I don't know who may have Mobile & Web turned on or off, or who may have the "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories" preference turned on or off, and if one of these settings accounts for different results for so many users.)

Quicken Marcus

We just shipped 5.12.4 which fixes a few issues.

5.12.4 Fixes

• FIXED - Fixed an issue in which dividends for some investment accounts were being double-counted. Quicken was adding both dividends and reinvested dividends for the same security. Quicken will now only keep the reinvested dividend when downloading future transactions and will also fix currently affected accounts.
• FIXED - Fixed an issue in which the sign of an eBill would be incorrect if there was a linked transfer to an account that wasn't synced.
• FIXED - Fixed an issue in which Quicken Bill Pay wouldn't work for Capital One accounts.
• FIXED - Fixed an issue in which a banner stating "Your Quicken Bill Pay settings need to be updated" would persist if there were 2 or more Quicken Bill Pay user names.

Quicken Marcus

James Sapp said:

Update on my Hide/Show column issue in the transaction view for Investment type accounts. The feature will work but in full screen mode only. It should work also when not in full screen view like the other types of accounts. Quicken technical support rep helped identify this issue and has passed it on to Quicken Development for resolution.

James, can you right-click or CTRL+Click on the register header to see if that works.  We've figured out the problem.  It has to do with the screen size. I don't see the issue you're running into on my MacBook Pro because I guess my resolution is high enough so it doesn't happen but if you are on a low enough resolution MacBook where there's not enough screen space for the menu to fit and you click on the Columns button at the bottom of the screen, you will see the issue.  If we do a 5.12.5, the fix will be in that release but it's currently planned for 5.13.

Quicken Marcus

Alan Grobman said:

In the new update the reinvest dividend is not working correctly for me. It did the reinvest dividend but then it also shows another entry for dividend income. This creates multiple income entries for the same dividend.

Alan, this should be fixed in 5.12.4.

jacobs

@Quicken Marcus You should take a quick read of this thread about a bug (or at least oddity) with the new scheduled transaction feature for when scheduling a payment twice a year.

Quicken Marcus

jacobs said:

@Quicken Marcus Thanks for the responses. In terms of categorization, I do understand it's working for some users, but there are an unusually large number of users complaining about it not working here; there are more comments about this not working than anything else in Quicken Mac. I don't know if you saw the list I compiled for you on a previous page of this thread of users complaining about this issue, but all of them say Quicken is not using the category of the previous instance of the same Payee. You say above that "today, Quicken always applies the last category a user assigned to a payee whether it makes sense or not" -- but there are a bunch of users saying that's not what they are experiencing.

Here's one recent quote which encapsulates the frustration many users are experiencing from operation that is not as you describe:

Quicken can see literally dozens of entries with [the same] statement payee name. It can see that EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. I rename it and set a category. When it downloads a new statement entry, where in the world is it coming up with this bogus category? How can I make it stop wasting my time?

I do believe this did used to work the way you describe, but was broken for some users in a previous update. (I don't know who may have Mobile & Web turned on or off, or who may have the "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories" preference turned on or off, and if one of these settings accounts for different results for so many users.)

We think we may have figured out what happened here.  There is a preference that controls whether classic auto-categorization is turned on or off.  Classic categorization is where Quicken remembers the last transaction and category pair and applies it to future downloaded transactions.  I'm guessing at some point it was either a Preference in the Preference dialog or an engineer wrote it so it could be added to Preferences in the future. It's definitely not in the Preference dialog today.

When someone runs Quicken for the first time, we write out a default set of preferences to get people started and then this is modified over time as people use the product or change preferences in the Preference dialog.  The classic auto-categorization setting is part of this default preference file and is set to be On for everyone.

Unfortunately, a bug was introduced most likely in 5.6 where default preferences weren't getting written which means the setting to turn on classic auto-categorization wasn't there and therefore was turned off.  The reason most people aren't running into this issue is because 1)  If you simply upgrade, your preference file doesn't change so most people already have this setting turned on and 2) Most customers who started with the new Quicken take advantage of the auto-categorization service which uses machine learning to assign categories and gets it right 85% to 95% of the time.  The people most affected by this issue are 2007 users who imported their files using the 5.6 release or newer or people getting new computers and starting from scratch.  I'm thinking people thought this may have changed in January because they upgraded to the new Quicken or got a new computer for Christmas or Hanukkah.

Anyway, we're working on a fix now. If you want to give this a try, just go to Terminal and type "defaults write com.quicken.Quicken ApplyHistoricAutoCategorization 1".  I've reached out to everyone that Jacobs referenced and will get them a new version once it's ready and see if it fixes the issue for them.  If it does, then we'll release it to everyone.

jacobs

Yay! Finally there's a logical explanation why different users were having different experiences with categorization (or lack thereof). It sounds like a fixed version should follow shortly. Thanks for diving in to investigate and get to the root of the problem; a lot of frustrated Quicken users are about to get relief for their biggest complaint.

Marshall A

According to the Quicken release notes webpage: https://www.quicken.com/support/20182019-release-quicken-mac-subscription-product-release-notes

Version 5.12.0, 5.12.1, 5.12.2, 5.12.3, & 5.12.4 (8/2019 & 9/2019)

"NEW - Sync scheduled transactions so that mobile and web will match projected balances on Mac."

Has anyone been able to find on the web version where the scheduled transactions are or where it is taking scheduled transactions into account to do projected balances in the future?

Quicken Marcus

Marshall A said:

According to the Quicken release notes webpage: https://www.quicken.com/support/20182019-release-quicken-mac-subscription-product-release-notes

Version 5.12.0, 5.12.1, 5.12.2, 5.12.3, & 5.12.4 (8/2019 & 9/2019)

"NEW - Sync scheduled transactions so that mobile and web will match projected balances on Mac."

Has anyone been able to find on the web version where the scheduled transactions are or where it is taking scheduled transactions into account to do projected balances in the future?

Sorry, this isn't correct.  We turned off Scheduled Transaction Sync for Mac because we ran into issues and still have bugs to fix.  We hope to turn it on in the next release.  I believe Scheduled Transactions have been turned on for Windows R22 and should now be available on the web and mobile apps for Windows users.

Quicken Marcus

We just shipped version 5.12.5 which fixes the auto-categorization issue and investment column menu problem brought up in the comments of this forum post.  Here are the release notes.

5.12.5 Fixes

• FIXED - Fixed an issue in which auto-categorization did not work for some customers.
• FIXED - Fixed a Bank Bill Pay issue in which a nine-digit zip code caused some banks to reject the bill pay command.
• FIXED - Fixed an issue that prevented the Column menu from appearing in the investment register when you selected the Column toolbar button.

caram

I just got this unexpected dialog box after adding a scheduled transaction.

I remember there used to be such an issue on startup when you don't sync your account to the cloud. But this was fixed a while ago and suddenly it seems to b e coming to the surface again.

Here are the steps I followed that led to the unexpected dialog:
1. Move to Bills & Income / Projected Balances
2. Mark a scheduled transaction as Paid
3. Duplicate the transaction
4. Schedule selected transaction
5. Save the transaction just created
6. The dialog box pops up
(some of the steps above may be unnecessary)

Caram

PS. BTW, it would be good if one had the possibility to change our own forum alias. I had to create a new account as a result because mine was not quite suitable as a result of the forum migration a while ago.

caram

There is quite an annoying unwanted feature that was introduced in 5.12.

I like payees' names to start with a capital letter. They're all in capitals in my quicken file. However, since 5.12, when I enter a new transaction such as "groce", QM autocompletes with "grocery", but all lower case even though the memorised Payee is "Grocery" with a capital "G". And then the memorised payee becomes "grocery" with a lowercase "g"!

This is quite frustrating and I'm surprised no one has reported this unwanted side effect (but I have not been following the forum tightly recently, so I may have missed a post or two).

One workaround would be to hit Shift before typing the first letter, but this would defeat the purpose of autocomplete. Autocomplete is supposed to reduce the number of keys typed and Shift would be quite cumbersome to use for every transaction/payee.

Ideally, this could be an option: to start payees with an uppercase or lowercase letter.


BTW, there is a further issue that I have reported through QM but not in the forum. The new autocomplete does not seem to using diacritical match when searching for a matching transaction/payee.

For example, "veg" will match recorded payee "Vegan", but "vég" will not. This is a critical feature when using UTF-8 payee's names, which I do. And this would seem quite an easy fix.

Quicken Marcus

caram said:

There is quite an annoying unwanted feature that was introduced in 5.12.

I like payees' names to start with a capital letter. They're all in capitals in my quicken file. However, since 5.12, when I enter a new transaction such as "groce", QM autocompletes with "grocery", but all lower case even though the memorised Payee is "Grocery" with a capital "G". And then the memorised payee becomes "grocery" with a lowercase "g"!

This is quite frustrating and I'm surprised no one has reported this unwanted side effect (but I have not been following the forum tightly recently, so I may have missed a post or two).

One workaround would be to hit Shift before typing the first letter, but this would defeat the purpose of autocomplete. Autocomplete is supposed to reduce the number of keys typed and Shift would be quite cumbersome to use for every transaction/payee.

Ideally, this could be an option: to start payees with an uppercase or lowercase letter.


BTW, there is a further issue that I have reported through QM but not in the forum. The new autocomplete does not seem to using diacritical match when searching for a matching transaction/payee.

For example, "veg" will match recorded payee "Vegan", but "vég" will not. This is a critical feature when using UTF-8 payee's names, which I do. And this would seem quite an easy fix.

Interesting.  I don't think that was intentional.  Let me have someone investigate. 

UPDATE: I can't seem to replicate this issue except with the OPT+TAB but that key combination always worked that way. caram, How are you exiting the field?  Are you using Tab.  Are you seeing the right word selected in the drop-down menu prior to tabbing out of the field? 

smali

How do I stop Quicken from automatically applying categories to downloaded transactions? I want to add all the categories myself, not have Quicken add them for me.

jacobs

Go to Quicken Preferences > Connected Services and uncheck the box for "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories."

Alternatively, let Quicken auto-categorize them and then edit the transactions to change the categories you want to change. If you doublee click on the transaction in the category column, the transaction will open for editing with the category highlighted, so the first character you type will wipe out what's there. It's no more work than editing a downoaded transaction that has a Category of Uncategorized.

smali

I turned off the "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories", but when I synced my accounts this morning, the transfer from one bank account to another still downloaded as "Transfer" category, while all the other transactions, including payments to credit cards and purchases came up as "Uncategorized".

Is there a way to fully disable the automatic assigning of categories? Turning off the setting you mentioned seems to have stopped a lot of them, but not all.

I use the "Uncategorized" default as my way of knowing which transactions I still need to enter details into. When Quicken does it automatically, I find that a lot of them are not categorized the way I would like and it is difficult for me to identify which ones I entered and which ones were entered by Quicken.

For example, if I make a purchase at a grocery store, many times the automatic categorization of "groceries" is correct, but sometimes I may have bought a pre-made lunch there and want to categorize it as "dining" so I can track it with my dining out/restaurant expenses. If Quicken automatically assigns "groceries" to all those transactions, it makes it harder for me to remember which ones I actually entered that way versus which ones were auto-populated and need to be reviewed. Not sure if that makes sense or not.

jacobs

I can't answer why the one transaction transfering funds from one bank account to another was categorized as Transfer.

In terms of the broader issue, it's pretty much up t each Quicken user to figure out which requires less manual intervention: letting Quicken categorize transacitons and then manually fixeding the ones it gets wrong, or not letting Quicken categorize transactions and manualy categorizing them all. I would think for most users Quicken would get the correct category more than 50% of the time, in which case letting it auto-categorize and then fixing the ones you want would be less work -- but that's a personal workflow decision.