Quicken for Mac v5.13 Released

Quicken Marcus

Today we're starting the rollout of Quicken for Mac v5.13. 5.13 is a relatively small release with some key improvements in list windows, reports and import.

Enhanced List WIndows
First off, we've added a bunch of small enhancements to the list windows: Payees, Categories, Tags, Action, and Securities.

1) We now pop-up a window to help merge Payees, Categories and Tags. Select the items you want merged and then click on the merge button to display the Merge window.  The Merge window tells you how many times the item is used to help you decide which one to pick as the final name.

2) You can now use Right-Click or Control-Click to bring up a contextual menu.
3) We now display the count of how many items you have in the list window.
4) And finally, we've added Search to the Category window.


Cash Flow, Transfer, Adjustment, Realized and Unrealized Gain added to Reports
Second, we added a bunch of new report capabilities.

1) We changed the way Create New Transaction, Summary and Comparison reports work.  Now you'll see all of the options laid out as radio buttons vs drop-downs which make it a little easier to see all of the options available.


2) We've now added the ability to see reports organized by Cash Flow in addition to Income and Expense.  Cash Flow looks at Inflows and Outflows from your accounts and isn't based purely on the category type.

3) Along with this, we now provide better control over how Transfers and Adjustments work in reports.  You can decide whether you want to include or exclude them or to just see transfers when they are coming to or from accounts that are external from the selected accounts in the report.  Both Cash Flow, Transfers and Adjustments are controlled under a new Advanced Tab in Customize Report.


4) We've improved reports for investors as well.  You can now add Realized Gain and Unrealized Gain in summary and comparison reports. These values are now calculated for the range of time designated.

Importing Files
Finally, if you've upgraded to Catalina you may or may not have noticed that importing files stopped working. This is because the local Quicken 2007 and Quicken Windows converters are 32-bit applications that Apple blocks from running on macOS Catalina.  We've solved this by building a cloud-based converter.

There are a bunch of other little tweaks and bug fixes throughout the product.  Please use this forum post to tell us if you see any issues with the 5.13 release.  We'll be monitoring this forum.

UPDATES
10/30/2019 - Starting to roll out the 5.13 release.  It's in limited distribution.
10/31/2019 - We've paused the rollout, for now, to see how customers are doing and to review any issues that come up.
11/1/2019 - We've started rolling out 5.13.1 which fixes a crash when merging Payees that occurs only on macOS 10.11 El Capitan.  If you're on 10.11, please considering upgrading to a new macOS version.  We're seeing a spike in 10.11 issues so it's not as stable as the newer releases and we don't officially support it anymore.  We are not enforcing this yet but at some point in the future, if you're running macOS 10.11, you won't be allowed to upgrade anymore so please consider moving to a newer macOS.

Tom Auer

I'm delighted by this features list. I'm still curious as to when/how Quicken will improve credit card payment estimating and estimates for seasonally-variable bills.

Austin@

Update installed perfectly and data file converted without any issues. Very excited about the new reporting and list enhancements. Any word on when scheduled transactions will be working in Quicken on the Web for Quicken Mac users would be appreciated (it was previously announced for Mac and is currently working for Windows users).

Thanks for your hard work @Quicken Marcus and team!

Richard Anderson

Finally, a search box in the Category window. I've waited a long time for that. With 409 categories sometimes it took a long time to find one. Hooray.

But wait, searching for "income" or "expense" only brings up 35 or 33 of the categories. So, to look at all the Income categories I can't search.

In the previous QW, I could SORT by Type in the Category Window and it would pile all the income types together making it easier to re-categorize income categories.

But wait, in QM 5.13.0 (the new one) sort on the Type column is grayed out (as is on the Tax-related, Descriptions, and Status columns). So not, instead of having just a few dozen income types grouped together to look through, they are now scattered amongst all 405.

This is one step forward and two steps back for me.

John Keating

I have a summary report on a single checking account. Some transactions are categorized as "Transfer", and others as "Transfer[otheracct]".

When I choose "Include only transfers with accounts outside of report", the report includes both kinds of transfers. Shouldn't it be excluding transactions with "Transfer" category?

Instead, it's acting as though I selected "include all transfers".

Oddly, when I also include the external "otheracct" in the report (from Accounts tab), "Include only transfers with accounts outside of report" ONLY shows transfers that are internal to the first account, and excludes transfers between the two accounts… exactly the opposite of what it says it does.

------
Version 5.13.0 (Build 513.30536.100)
macOS 10.15

jacobs

@Richard Anderson I agree, this seems like an error or omission. All the list windows (Categories, Payees, Tags, Securities) should work alike: they all have a Search box now, and the improved Merge button. But for some reason, while the Securities and Payees windows continue to allow clicking on any column heading to sort, the Categories and Tags windows only allow sorting by Name -- but should allow sorting by the other columns, as they did previously. (And you give a good practical example of why this is needed.) Hopefully this can quickly be fixed in the next release.

jacobs

@Quicken Marcus In the update to reports, why is the Advanced tab not available when creating a Transaction report? I can't think of a reason not to be able to make the same selections for a Transaction report, which should be the same as a Summary report with all the details shown.

And I've noticed that switching a report between a Summary and Transaction report produces different totals -- where I'd expect them to be identical. The difference for me is that the Summary report includes Realized Gain/Loss in investment income, but the Transaction report does not. These reports should produce identical results (assuming the same parameters are used).

chitownhockey

Budgets...can I select which accounts I want included in the budget? Which will allow users to basically include or exclude transfers in the budget? If not, when will this feature be added?

Quicken_Tyka

Hello chitownhockey,

Thank you for taking the time to come to the Community to post your question.

At this time, there currently isn't an option to exclude accounts from the Budget in Quicken for Mac.

However, this feature is has been marked as "planned" and will be available in a future release, I am unable to provide an ETA at this time.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7333959/add-ability-to-include-or-exclude-accounts-on-budgets-in-quicken-for-mac-262-legacy-votes#latest

You make bookmark the Idea thread above to be notified of any updates or changes.

Thank you,
-Quicken Tyka

Quicken Marcus

chitownhockey said:

Budgets...can I select which accounts I want included in the budget? Which will allow users to basically include or exclude transfers in the budget? If not, when will this feature be added?

As Quicken_Tyka says, we have not updated budgets yet but we know it's an important feature to include control of Transfers so one can budget mortgage payments using linked transfers.  I personally track these things with the Mortage category and then it can be budgeted but I realize a lot of people would rather use a linked transfer.  Providing control of transfers in reports is the first step.

Quicken Marcus

jacobs said:

@Quicken Marcus In the update to reports, why is the Advanced tab not available when creating a Transaction report? I can't think of a reason not to be able to make the same selections for a Transaction report, which should be the same as a Summary report with all the details shown.

And I've noticed that switching a report between a Summary and Transaction report produces different totals -- where I'd expect them to be identical. The difference for me is that the Summary report includes Realized Gain/Loss in investment income, but the Transaction report does not. These reports should produce identical results (assuming the same parameters are used).

Yes, these features only work on Summary and Comparison reports in 5.13.  They will be added to transaction reports in a future update.  

Quicken Marcus

John Keating said:

I have a summary report on a single checking account. Some transactions are categorized as "Transfer", and others as "Transfer[otheracct]".

When I choose "Include only transfers with accounts outside of report", the report includes both kinds of transfers. Shouldn't it be excluding transactions with "Transfer" category?

Instead, it's acting as though I selected "include all transfers".

Oddly, when I also include the external "otheracct" in the report (from Accounts tab), "Include only transfers with accounts outside of report" ONLY shows transfers that are internal to the first account, and excludes transfers between the two accounts… exactly the opposite of what it says it does.

------
Version 5.13.0 (Build 513.30536.100)
macOS 10.15

Yes, transfers work differently if you use linked transfers or the Transfer category.  For transactions that use the Transfer category, there is no way for us to know whether the transfer is from an external or internal account since we don't know where the transfer is coming from.  I think it's a fair argument as to whether we should include or exclude Transfer category transactions.  We decided to include them. The bottom line is if you want that finer control then you should probably use a linked transfer. Also, Transfer categories transactions are also aggregated as a single line item in the report. 

Linked transfers are the ones that appear as Transfer:[otheracct] in the category field which is saying that you are transferring money to otheracct if the sign is negative in Checking and transferring money from the otheracct if it's positive. This should then appear as TO or FROM in the report.

If you are seeing the linked transfers from the otheracct when you've included it in the report then this is a bug.  You should only see them if otheracct is NOT part of the report.

Quicken Marcus

Richard Anderson said:

Finally, a search box in the Category window. I've waited a long time for that. With 409 categories sometimes it took a long time to find one. Hooray.

But wait, searching for "income" or "expense" only brings up 35 or 33 of the categories. So, to look at all the Income categories I can't search.

In the previous QW, I could SORT by Type in the Category Window and it would pile all the income types together making it easier to re-categorize income categories.

But wait, in QM 5.13.0 (the new one) sort on the Type column is grayed out (as is on the Tax-related, Descriptions, and Status columns). So not, instead of having just a few dozen income types grouped together to look through, they are now scattered amongst all 405.

This is one step forward and two steps back for me.

I believe Search is only working on the category name so if you search for "Income" or "Expense" it is only finding those categories that have those words in the name.  It's not searching Type but I can see how you might expect it to search for Type or why you would want to see all income or expense categories.  I'll see what we can do for a future release.

In terms of sorting of the columns.  We turned them off because they didn't work as you would expect because of the nested categories.  For example, here's a screenshot of how categories sorted by Type worked in 5.8.2.



It's not easy to get it to work so we turned it off since it was buggy and we felt search provided a good alternative.  I get that it's not a replacement but I also didn't want to spend a lot of dev time on it.

Quicken Marcus

Austin said:

Update installed perfectly and data file converted without any issues. Very excited about the new reporting and list enhancements. Any word on when scheduled transactions will be working in Quicken on the Web for Quicken Mac users would be appreciated (it was previously announced for Mac and is currently working for Windows users).

Thanks for your hard work @Quicken Marcus and team!

We have scheduled transaction sync working but it's still not at the quality level we want.  We thought we'd have it ready for 5.12 and 5.13 but then we keep finding issues and so we've had to pull it for the past 2 releases.  We continue to work through the issues and will ship it as soon as we can. Thank you for letting us know its something you're interested in.

Quicken Marcus

Tom Auer said:

I'm delighted by this features list. I'm still curious as to when/how Quicken will improve credit card payment estimating and estimates for seasonally-variable bills.

Tom, have you tried Bill Presentment?  If you link an eBill to a scheduled transaction, we'll update the amount automatically for you.  Go to Bills & Income and click on + New Bill.  We support most of the major credit card companies and utilities but there are varying degrees of quality.  For example, I do know that for some reason USAA takes a really long time to link and sometimes it times out before it finishes.  I personally have Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, AMEX, and US Bank credit cards  and they seem to work pretty well.

Casper

Updated failed. After update and while trying to load data file, received message: "The operation couldn't be completed. (NSSQLiteErrorDomain error 10.)
Pushing through I saw additional errors, "An error occurred during persistent store migration." and "The document "<my document name>" could not be opened. ...blah blah...last opened by Quicken 5.12.5 (Build 512.29294.100). ... Make sure you have the latest... using 2.13.0."
Reverted back to 5.12.5, which, when checking for updates, is now claimed to be the latest, and no update to 5.13.0 to be seen.

chitownhockey

> @Quicken Marcus said:
> (Quote)
> As Quicken_Tyka says, we have not updated budgets yet but we know it's an important feature to include control of Transfers so one can budget mortgage payments using linked transfers.  I personally track these things with the Mortage category and then it can be budgeted but I realize a lot of people would rather use a linked transfer.  Providing control of transfers in reports is the first step.

I guess I'm not following how to get this to work. Yes, I have the principal portion setup as a Mortgage:Principal category AND as a transfer to my mortgage loan account in Quicken. There is no way to show that principal amount in the budget this way.

Do you categorize the principal as I have listed above...but without the transfer to the mortgage loan account? If so, how do you account for reducing the mortgage balance?

I'm confused.

John Keating

> @Quicken Marcus said:
> (Quote)
> Yes, transfers work differently if you use linked transfers or the Transfer category.  For transactions that use the Transfer category, there is no way for us to know whether the transfer is from an external or internal account since we don't know where the transfer is coming from.  I think it's a fair argument as to whether we should include or exclude Transfer category transactions.  We decided to include them. The bottom line is if you want that finer control then you should probably use a linked transfer. Also, Transfer categories transactions are also aggregated as a single line item in the report. 
>
> Linked transfers are the ones that appear as Transfer:[otheracct] in the category field which is saying that you are transferring money to otheracct if the sign is negative in Checking and transferring money from the otheracct if it's positive. This should then appear as TO or FROM in the report.
>
> If you are seeing the linked transfers from the otheracct when you've included it in the report then this is a bug.  You should only see them if otheracct is NOT part of the report.

Thanks Marcus. I use "Transfer" to indicate generic transfers to/from accounts not in Quicken, whereas linked transfers are obviously to external accounts in Quicken. For me, it would be most useful to be able to distinguish between the two which I was thinking that option did for some reason. It looks like things are working as designed, but I'd put in my vote to exclude "Transfer" from reports when that option is chosen, or to have an additional option that accomplishes this.

Richard Anderson

> @Quicken Marcus said:
> (Quote)
> I believe Search is only working on the category name so if you search for "Income" or "Expense" it is only finding those categories that have those words in the name.  It's not searching Type but I can see how you might expect it to search for Type or why you would want to see all income or expense categories.  I'll see what we can do for a future release.
>
> In terms of sorting of the columns.  We turned them off because they didn't work as you would expect because of the nested categories. 
___________________________

OK, that explains it. For a while I thought maybe it was only showing Quicken default income categories.

To get around QM not searching the Type field, I appended "Inc" to all my income category names. So now, when I search for "Inc" it pulls up all my income category items together to make it easier to rearrange and/or rename categories. Works for me.

Again, thanks for finally providing a search on the categories window!!!

Marian Hill

I installed 13.0 on one computer, but the other computer I use to access my file (in Dropbox) won't install it. I shows 12.5 as the latest version available when I try. So I now can't open my updated Quicken file :/ on my main computer.

This a completely unacceptable way to "roll out" a new version!!!!

jonbud39

I can't update my Quicken to 5.13 on my MacBook Pro late 2016. It stays at 5.12.5. whenever u release an update u would successfully do 2 of my MacBook Pro laptops at the same time but not this time. My other Mac book pro is 2018 edition.

jacobs

Quicken always releases software in stages, stopping and starting a few times to see if any major problems are reported that would nece3ssaitate stopping distribution and coming up with a quick fix. So during this time, you may sometimes catch it when the gate is open for downloads and at another time catch it when the gate is closed. You can either wait a day or two -- normally, they open the gate for wide release within a couple of days, unless significant problems have surfaced -- or you can copy the quicken.app file from your applications folder on one machine to another. 

Marian Hill

I wish the support person I "chatted" with several hours ago had suggested that. Her attitude was basically "tough". And I assumed i needed the installer to get the file on my main computer. So I just spent (wasted) several hours—getting a transaction list of all transactions since Oct 20 from the computer with 13.0, figuring out which file(s) from the folder in Dropbox I had to restore to be able to use open Quicken with 12.5, getting rid of 13.0 and figuring out where on the Quicken website to go to download Quicken again (which I rightly assumed was going to be 12.5). Now I am back to 12.5 on both computers and my file is where it was on Oct. 20, and I will spend another couple of hours catching up.

gojohn

I completely agree that it's unacceptable to roll something out and stop it in the middle. It messes with people who use more than one computer to access their data as well as someone who sets up a new computer and copies things over.

The availability of the update should be separate from the suggestion to update. I should be able to still download the 5.13 build from somewhere (anywhere) if I need to. Quicken can fiddle with the update suggestion all it wants, but do so separately. (Though it's still weird for it to say I'm "Up to date" and my version "is currently the newest version available." I know better because I'm running a newer version somewhere else.)

jonbud39

"can copy the quicken.app file from your applications folder on one machine to another". I tried that numerous times but no luck. To save time I wanted to copy a split transaction to another computer instead of entering again.

MACD123

I very much appreciate the additions to the reports. One issue I'm having though is that securities I no longer own are showing up as unrealized gains instead of realized gains. What is odd is that the securities that are reporting incorrectly change each time I do the report. As an example, I can run a report and AAPL will be listed as unrealized instead of realized. I delete that report and create it again, but this time AMZN will show up unrealized instead of realized.

My stock ownership list and the realized gains drop down menu from the portfolio view are perfectly correct, but for some reasons several of the stocks on that realized gains listing show up as unrealized when I run reports. Which stocks report incorrectly seems to be random.

Quicken Marcus

chitownhockey said:

@Quicken Marcus said:
As Quicken_Tyka says, we have not updated budgets yet but we know it's an important feature to include control of Transfers so one can budget mortgage payments using linked transfers.  I personally track these things with the Mortage category and then it can be budgeted but I realize a lot of people would rather use a linked transfer.  Providing control of transfers in reports is the first step.

I guess I'm not following how to get this to work. Yes, I have the principal portion setup as a Mortgage:Principal category AND as a transfer to my mortgage loan account in Quicken. There is no way to show that principal amount in the budget this way.

Do you categorize the principal as I have listed above...but without the transfer to the mortgage loan account? If so, how do you account for reducing the mortgage balance?

I'm confused.

Chitownhockey - I think what you're asking for is the feature that is not there yet which is the ability to budget linked transfers.

The alternative method I was talking about is to simply track one side of it which is the payment from the checking account.  In this method, you don't do a real transfer. You simply categorize your mortgage payment transaction that appears in your checking account and categorize it as Mortgage Payment or something like that and call it an expense.  You can budget this.

On the loan side if it's a connected loan, Quicken will automatically add an adjustment to make sure your balance matches the online balance and this is a proxy for the principal. I don't personally track this side of it.

This is probably not the right accounting thing to do but for my purposes, it seems to work. I'm mostly interested in money leaving my checking account so I can make sure I have enough to cover expenses.  I also like to budget discretionary things like eating out or general shopping since these are things I can control or may need to cut back on if I feel like we're overspending.

The great thing about Quicken is it's flexibility so people can manage their money the way they want.

MACD123

I don't see how to edit my post so let me add that after running about a dozen tests, it seems to only happen with securities that I held at the turn of the year.

t> @MACD123 said:
> I very much appreciate the additions to the reports. One issue I'm having though is that securities I no longer own are showing up as unrealized gains instead of realized gains. What is odd is that the securities that are reporting incorrectly change each time I do the report. As an example, I can run a report and AAPL will be listed as unrealized instead of realized. I delete that report and create it again, but this time AMZN will show up unrealized instead of realized.
>
> My stock ownership list and the realized gains drop down menu from the portfolio view are perfectly correct, but for some reasons several of the stocks on that realized gains listing show up as unrealized when I run reports. Which stocks report incorrectly seems to be random.

Quicken Marcus

gojohn said:

I completely agree that it's unacceptable to roll something out and stop it in the middle. It messes with people who use more than one computer to access their data as well as someone who sets up a new computer and copies things over.

The availability of the update should be separate from the suggestion to update. I should be able to still download the 5.13 build from somewhere (anywhere) if I need to. Quicken can fiddle with the update suggestion all it wants, but do so separately. (Though it's still weird for it to say I'm "Up to date" and my version "is currently the newest version available." I know better because I'm running a newer version somewhere else.)

You're right.  We could do it better by using your user id as a basis as to whether you would get the release or not but we haven't done the development work to make that happen yet.  We'll give it more thought as to how to make this work smoother.  We don't typically intend to pause the release unless its a big release like 5.12 so this normally wouldn't happen but we did find an issue in 5.13 that we wanted to fix yesterday which is why I paused it. 

Quicken Marcus

Richard Anderson said:

> @Quicken Marcus said:
> (Quote)
> I believe Search is only working on the category name so if you search for "Income" or "Expense" it is only finding those categories that have those words in the name.  It's not searching Type but I can see how you might expect it to search for Type or why you would want to see all income or expense categories.  I'll see what we can do for a future release.
>
> In terms of sorting of the columns.  We turned them off because they didn't work as you would expect because of the nested categories. 
___________________________

OK, that explains it. For a while I thought maybe it was only showing Quicken default income categories.

To get around QM not searching the Type field, I appended "Inc" to all my income category names. So now, when I search for "Inc" it pulls up all my income category items together to make it easier to rearrange and/or rename categories. Works for me.

Again, thanks for finally providing a search on the categories window!!!

That's really creative. Cool idea but I want to let you know that I realize you shouldn't have to do that and that we should make it work on Type too.  Thanks for the creative solution and suggestion to others until we can fix it.

Quicken Marcus

John Keating said:

> @Quicken Marcus said:
> (Quote)
> Yes, transfers work differently if you use linked transfers or the Transfer category.  For transactions that use the Transfer category, there is no way for us to know whether the transfer is from an external or internal account since we don't know where the transfer is coming from.  I think it's a fair argument as to whether we should include or exclude Transfer category transactions.  We decided to include them. The bottom line is if you want that finer control then you should probably use a linked transfer. Also, Transfer categories transactions are also aggregated as a single line item in the report. 
>
> Linked transfers are the ones that appear as Transfer:[otheracct] in the category field which is saying that you are transferring money to otheracct if the sign is negative in Checking and transferring money from the otheracct if it's positive. This should then appear as TO or FROM in the report.
>
> If you are seeing the linked transfers from the otheracct when you've included it in the report then this is a bug.  You should only see them if otheracct is NOT part of the report.

Thanks Marcus. I use "Transfer" to indicate generic transfers to/from accounts not in Quicken, whereas linked transfers are obviously to external accounts in Quicken. For me, it would be most useful to be able to distinguish between the two which I was thinking that option did for some reason. It looks like things are working as designed, but I'd put in my vote to exclude "Transfer" from reports when that option is chosen, or to have an additional option that accomplishes this.

That makes perfect sense. Let me take this back to my team to discuss it.