Quicken for Mac v5.13 Released

caram

> @J Carson said:
> Manually importing bank download data requires to quit Quicken and start it again for the next downloaded file to be imported. Otherwise, it won't import.

Can you say a bit more? Are you not seeing the import the "Preparing to import..." dialog? I don't believe I have this issue.

caram

> @Quicken Marcus said:
> 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?

@Marcus, I am able to share more light on this. In the example below, I am typing the first four letter: "bess" from the Payee: "Bessec". When I press TAB, the "Create new online payee" window comes up. Because this is the option selected by QM in the drop-down menu.

The correct choice should have been the payee "Bessec", but for some reason it was not selected.

Notice this issue seems to occur rather randomly, and most often after I launch QM. In a typical session, this will occur 2 to 3 times out of 10 to 20 transactions.

caram

> @caram wrote on Sep. 29:
> I like payees' names to start with a capital letter. 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"!

I may have found the reason for the issue: if I press TAB too quickly in the Payee field (and I generally do - years of ingrained habit), the autocomplete dropdown has not time to show up and the payee ends up in lowercase.

If I wait for the dropdown menu to appear, and then and only then press TAB, the payee ends up correctly capitalized.

I don't think it should matter how quickly I press TAB. I think the behavior should be identical in both situations. I'd like to be able to press TAB quickly.

See screenshots:
1. after pressing TAB quickly
2. waiting before pressing TAB
3. after having waited to press TAB

jacobs

I agree: if Quicken is matching an existing payee from what is typed, it should use that existing Payee as it currently exists in the database, and should never change the case of any of the letters. It's currently very annoying that it changes the Payee to lower case if you type it that way.

caram

There is an issue with Summary/Comparison reports, transfers and categories.

For reporting purposes, I do assign to certain transfer transactions a category (Fee, in practice) which is not the default Transfer:[Other Account] category.

I then use a summary report to display transactions that have the Fee category. This used to work well; however, now that transfers are handled somewhat differently in reports, transfers with the Fee category no longer show up. But if I select "Include all transfers", all transfers show up, irrespective of the category. It seems the criteria for the report are not applied to transfer transactions!

How can I achieve what I want (and that used to be possible)?

jacobs

First, can I ask a question why you assign the Fee category to a transfer? Is the expense not one of the transactions in the account you are transferring with?

The implementation of allowing transfers to also have categories was, in my mind, an odd choice by the developers that often creates more problems than it solves. I think this exists because the program code from the old Quicken Essentials was used as the base for Quicken Mac, and Quicken Essentials didn't allow tracking investments and they needed a way to account for income or expenses transferred to/from accounts which were not tracked in Essentials. And it can still be used that way if you have some financial accounts you don't have in Quicken. But if you do have both sides of the transfer in Quicken, categorizing the transfer will in many cases double-count the income or expense which is recorded via a transaction in the other account.

If you could provide more details about your setup and what you're trying to accomplish, people here can probably suggest ways to achieve what you want.

caram

@jacobs, consider a medical doctor receiving payments in cheques or in cash. There is an account for both. The payee is the name of the patient. Then, regularly, cheques or the cash are deposited in a bank account, which is a third account in QM.

This double-entry bookkeeping allows to track and reconcile separately the payments by the patients and the bank deposits. The dates are usually different and so are the amounts because the deposits are made in bulk and the bank does register only the sum for a deposit, not the detail of the individual cheques it is made of. This is also necessary for tax purposes.

This works really well, except for the transfer issue that I have reported above. As mentioned, this is a regression from the behavior of QM a few weeks ago, because our reports used to work well before a recent update.

PS. Forget about the Fee category, it's not the real category that is used and was just used to try to make things simple. And yes I know about the background of QE and it's been discussed at length in an earlier incarnation of this forum.

Gasport

When are we going to see the addition of savings goals to the Mac edition? Still nowhere near parity with the Windows version

Dennis@1

caram said:

This double-entry bookkeeping allows to track and reconcile separately the payments by the patients and the bank deposits. The dates are usually different and so are the amounts because the deposits are made in bulk and the bank does register only the sum for a deposit, not the detail of the individual cheques it is made of. This is also necessary for tax purposes.

A bulk deposit is not a single item. It is a combination of all deposited cheques/payments. Use the split function on the deposits to track the detail of the individual cheques that make up the deposit.

jacobs

@caram As @Dennis@1 suggests, I wouldn't keep business records the way you're describing. You describe a Quicken account for cash and one for checks. I would instead keep Quicken accounts that mirror the real world; if you have one checking account, then have one checking account in Quicken. A bank deposit from multiple clients/patients could be recorded with split lines, using either the Memo field or Tags to identify the individuals.

If you really want to try to use Quicken to manage receivables and payments, you could create an asset account called Accounts Receivable. Each time you bill a client, you'd enter a transaction in this A/R account, categorized to revenue. When people pay, you'd enter a deposit transaction in your checking account, and the category would be a transfer to Accounts Receivable. That mimics a double-entry bookkeeping process. 

Shing

> @jacobs said:
> @caram As @Dennis@1 suggests, I wouldn't keep business records the way you're describing. You describe a Quicken account for cash and one for checks. I would instead keep Quicken accounts that mirror the real world; if you have one checking account, then have one checking account in Quicken. A bank deposit from multiple clients/patients could be recorded with split lines, using either the Memo field or Tags to identify the individuals.
>
> If you really want to try to use Quicken to manage receivables and payments, you could create an asset account called Accounts Receivable. Each time you bill a client, you'd enter a transaction in this A/R account, categorized to revenue. When people pay, you'd enter a deposit transaction in your checking account, and the category would be a transfer to Accounts Receivable. That mimics a double-entry bookkeeping process. 

I agree with @jacobs. Double-entry bookkeeping means for every transaction there is one debit and one credit. In QMAC you need two transactions: one to record the sale (debit A/R; credit Sales) and one to record the payment (debit Cash/credit A/R).

For A/R, you have several options. Create an asset account for every customer; use one asset account ("A/R") and either create tags for each customer or put the customer name in the memo field.

QMAC isn't necessarily the best application for businesses that go beyond the basics.

smayer97

Gasport said:

When are we going to see the addition of savings goals to the Mac edition? Still nowhere near parity with the Windows version

No one is likely to tell you when as features are rarely pre-announced. Meanwhile, you can add your VOTE for Add Savings Goals.

First, click on the underlined link above to go there, then click the little grey triangle under the VOTE count at the top of page 1 in the blue banner, so your vote will count for THIS feature and increase its visibility to the developers by seeking to have the features you need or desire end up in the latest version (it may take a moment for your vote to register).

Your VOTES matter!

caram

> @Dennis@1 said:
> (Quote)
> A bulk deposit is not a single item. It is a combination of all deposited
> cheques/payments. Use the split function on the deposits to track the
> detail of the individual cheques that make up the deposit.

No a split would not be handy here. Which cheques are deposited at the bank on a particular day is not known when the payment by the patient is first entered into QM, so they are best considered as 2 separate transactions and remember the dates of the payment by the patient and the date the cheque is cashed in need to be tracked separately. Besides, it's easier in the register to spot payments from a certain patient if they are not part of a split transaction. This was not an objective, but i's an added advantage.

caram

> @jacobs said:
> If you really want to try to use Quicken to manage receivables and payments, you could create an asset account called Accounts Receivable. Each time you bill a client, you'd enter a transaction in this A/R account, categorized to revenue. When people pay, you'd enter a deposit transaction in your checking account, and the category would be a transfer to Accounts Receivable. That mimics a double-entry bookkeeping process. 

I think what your describing is similar to what I'm doing already. And this is precisely where the issue of transfers come up in reports.

As for using split transactions, see my reply to @Denis. Using Memos or Tags would not be very handy in this occasion. Quick entry is an absolute must and Payee seems like the appropriate field to use, both from a practical and conceptual POV.

caram

> @Shing said:
> QMAC isn't necessarily the best application for businesses that go beyond the basics.

It's fair enough for a simple 1-person medical practice. QM was an immediate sell to my wife (she's the 1-person, actually, not me) once I sorted the accounts structure. She loves it and it's definitely the best home/small business financing software she's used ever (remember we started with Q back in 1994).

Kudos to the QM team. @Marcus et al, we can never thank you enough.

Shing

> @caram said:
> > @Shing said:
> > QMAC isn't necessarily the best application for businesses that go beyond the basics.
>
> It's fair enough for a simple 1-person medical practice. QM was an immediate sell to my wife (she's the 1-person, actually, not me) once I sorted the accounts structure. She loves it and it's definitely the best home/small business financing software she's used ever (remember we started with Q back in 1994).
>
> Kudos to the QM team. @Marcus et al, we can never thank you enough.

I agree with all you said.

Quicken was designed to be simple which means it doesn't strictly conform to double-entry bookkeeping. Even though I don't use it for business purposes, I do find myself sometimes drawing T-accounts for particularly difficult transactions and then figuring a way to make it work in Quicken. A little nerdy, yes, but that's how I learned!

szzz

thank you @Quicken Marcus for reporting here...

I have an issue that is perplexing!
I went to move my quicken mac 2020 after the recent update 5.13.1
and the window resized to occupy 9/10ths of my screen and wouldn't
allow (right arrow only) shrinking the width of the whole qmac window?

I am told by other users here that this feature (or failure) had been
incorporated some time ago, and somehow I must have been grandfathered
as to adjustment of the screen size?

I'm using a macbook 12' with 2304 x 1440 resolution, and previously displayed
all I needed in the smaller, ~5/8ths width of screen qmac 2020?

please say this was an oversight and that I won't need to look elsewhere to
regain screen real estate in a different financial software?

thx,

dave

mmotroni2006

@"Quicken Marcus" it appears that in reports, transactions that are assigned a category and a transfer do not show in reports. For example I track my mortgage payments with a split transaction from my checking account. The split is made up of an "Interest Payment" category and a "Principal Payment" category. The Principal Payment category is linked to the loan account to deduct that amount from the loan balance. In the previous version I could run a report and see both the interest and principal categories in reports. Now the principal category does not show. (It does show in the FROM checking and TO loan in the transfer section - but this section is cumulative and does not include the detail).

I also link categories to transfers when making improvements to an asset. For example I would categorize something as "Home Improvement" but then transfer it to the related asset account. That too does not show when running a report. I do this with my retirement accounts as well.

It is interesting to note that whenever I remove the link to the transfer account, the transaction then does show in the report. This was not an issue with the previous Quicken Mac version.

CC: @caram and @jacobs

Thank you.

Bosco

Hi, It seems that the window resizing doesn't work. I can make the window larger but I really want to shrink the width. When I hover over the right side the double arrow doesn't appear. I only get an arrow pointing to the right. After I make it wider then the double arrow appears to shrink the width. But it allows me to shrink it to a certain size then stops. Why can't I set the window width to any size I want?

Bosco

> @szzz said:
> thank you @Quicken Marcus for reporting here...
>
> I have an issue that is perplexing!
> I went to move my quicken mac 2020 after the recent update 5.13.1
> and the window resized to occupy 9/10ths of my screen and wouldn't
> allow (right arrow only) shrinking the width of the whole qmac window?
>
> I am told by other users here that this feature (or failure) had been
> incorporated some time ago, and somehow I must have been grandfathered
> as to adjustment of the screen size?
>
> I'm using a macbook 12' with 2304 x 1440 resolution, and previously displayed
> all I needed in the smaller, ~5/8ths width of screen qmac 2020?
>
> please say this was an oversight and that I won't need to look elsewhere to
> regain screen real estate in a different financial software?
>
> thx,
>
> dave

I certainly hope this is a bug not a 'feature', I just reported the same issue. It is very annoying.
Bruce (Bosco)

jacobs

@Bosco For reasons none of us in the user community know, the minimum screen width for the main Quicken window was expanded a bit a few updates ago. Quicken Mac has always had a minimum width and height for its main window; all that's changed recently (I think it was in the 5.12 release) is that the minimum width is now a bit wider than it had been since the days of Quicken 2015.

It's possible there are technical reasons for the minimum width in order to get all the possible screen elements to display. It's also possible it was an arbitrary or even erroneous change that they can reverse -- we just won't know unless Marcus posts a reply. (He typically doesn't post in these threads once a new release has been out a few weeks, as is the case here with version 5.13, so I don't know if he'll see this or reply.)

Bosco

@Jacobs Thanks for the information I hope Marcus does read this. The software should not control the width, it should put a slider at the bottom of the screen and let the user deal with the amount of screen real estate they wish to use. Quicken can call it a feature, but that term is used when something is screwed up and they wish to twist it to their advantage.

Bosco

@quicken marcus Thanks for the information Jacobs. I hope Marcus does read this. The software should not control the width, it should put a slider at the bottom of the screen and let the user deal with the amount of screen real estate they wish to use. Quicken can call it a feature, but that term is used when something is screwed up and they wish to twist it to their advantage.