How to create a 12 month cash flow history

conston

quicken used to be soooo easy to use. It was very intuitive. Now.... I just want to show my cash flows by month for the last 12 months. The only thing that I get is an option to show one month at a time. Very frustrating.

Help would be greatly appreciated.

Sherlock

I suggest you select Reports > Banking > Cash Flow and Month in the Column: pull-down menu.

Sherlock

I suggest you select Reports > Banking > Cash Flow and Month in the Column: pull-down menu.

conston

Hi Sherlock, Thanks for the response. I am so glad you wrote that. Because... That is the logical thing to do, and that is exactly what I did before even posting here. As I said in my original post, that when I do that it only gives me the information one month at a time. This can be seen in this screenshot https://www.screencast.com/t/88MVruFjP9. In my frustration, I figured it out. Because I am looking for the previous year, I have to select Last year, then under the column section I have to select month. Happy that I found it but again not very intuitive. Thanks again.

Jim_Harman

Quicken needs to know the date range for the report and what you want to see in the columns. For the Cash Flow report the columns can have a date interval (Month for example) or Categories, Payees, Tags, or Accounts. The selections at the top are labeled Date Range and Column.

Can you suggest a way to make it more intuitive? 

conston

Hi Jim,

So now that I discovered that it is pretty simple. But really looking at monthly/quarterly/annual cash flows on a column by column basis as they call it is fundamental to all business. This should not be something that needs to be searched for and being required to make several click 'throughs' to find it.

To make this easy, its as simple as addition by subtraction. Get rid of the by Column column option

Select Under Reports select

Income statement/Cash flow statement (etc)
Select Year /Current Year/Previous Year, custom
Select timeframe
Annual
Monthly
Quarterly
current month
previous month
(or select from the drop down menu the month that you want)

You can look at this super simple example of a of Apple's income statement.

https://www.screencast.com/t/G6xojRQOsN6B

There are only two options.

Select income statement, then select time frame (annual).

And it automatically gives you the information month by month.

It has been made overly complicated by adding in the option to add columns so that you can see the current period.

If someone wants to look at the current period or another period that is fine and reasonable, make that a separate two click operation.

'View cash flow statement for one period only' and select the period.

but we should be able to get in and see cash flows monthly seamlessly

In my business this happens when we have technology people driving the changes as opposed to financial people who have been working with and using the product. All the bells and whistles get added and teams are so excited because of all the improvements that they made. In this changes simple fundamental things can get missed. I'm speaking as a person who has used quicken since the early 90's and have been in financials just as long.

Thanks for the time and question.

NotACPA

" as they call it is fundamental to all business. "

BUT, Q is NOT a business product.  It's a 'PERSONAL Financial Manager".

If you need business functionality, switch to Quickbooks.