Latest Mac update makes reports even less useful

Ken Kast

Q-Mac's reports design was set up so that transfers did not show up in transaction reports. The rationale was that transfers don't really represent an increase or decrease in assets. That is true, but it assumes that reports are trying to keep track of income and expenses. There are a lot of other uses for reports besides income statements. Be that as it may, I worked around that by creating "dummy" categories representing certain accounts. When I transferred to one of those accounts I set the Category to the dummy and the Transfer to the actual. Now that the Category was no longer a transfer, I could build reports that would include the transfer transactions. A jury-rigged solution but it worked. The latest release, which touts including transfers, now assumes that any transaction with a transfer, regardless of the category, is to be considered as a transfer, and so is not included in the report. It blows my approach clean out of the water. And on top of that, transfers aren't really in the report. They've just created a third classification: Income, expense and transfers. So there's no integration of transfers, even mine with a legitimate category. The Quicken elves need either to revert the handling of non-transfer-categorized transactions to the way it used to be or to give the user the ability to specify that behavior.

jacobs

Well, movement of money really can't be -- or shouldn't be -- both a cash flow transfer and an expense; Quicken allowed it if you did it just right, but it was always problematic, because creating dummy accounts as you described may have fixed one problem but messed up other reporting. In the new release, you no longer need to create dummy categories. If you want to see a report based on cash flow -- e.g. including transfers -- you now can. To me, that makes the reports more useful not less useful; it's a feature many Quicken users have been asking for for a long time. To you, it seems less useful because you've been using a work-around with dummy categories that you've made work for your needs, but you're saying they shouldn't have done so because to breaks your work-around.

The latest release, which touts including transfers, now assumes that any transaction with a transfer, regardless of the category, is to be considered as a transfer, and so is not included in the report. 

Well, a transfer is a transfer. But now you can include transfers in reports -- that's the crux of the change they made. In the Advanced tab, you can specify whether to include all transfer of just transfers to accounts not in the report (or no transfers, if you wish). By using that setting, along with which accounts to include in a report, you can show one side of transfers (for example, just money out of checking via transfers) or both sides. So while the changes may blow your jury-rigged work-around out of the water, I think if you take a fresh look at how to do what you want to accomplish, you'll be able to find a solution which doesn't require the work-arounds you were using.

Ken Kast

Let me get to the point of my unhappiness. I have two savings accounts and two savings goals. Money for the goals is in both accounts. Further, money moves between the two accounts. I used to be able to get a great report that showed how much of each goal was covered in each account. Like a pivot table. I don't view this as an esoteric use case. In addition I could get a transaction report that showed how much money was credited and debited to each goal, including money transferring between these saving accounts. And it balanced: a debit in one account waqs balanced with a credit in the other. I can get neither of these reports with the Mac upgrade. It makes no difference that I exploited a capability of Quicken. It's not that Quicken gave me a new way of doing this. I cannot do this anymore. So, as long as I can't get a reasonable report with the new update, I will continue to profess that the report generator took a step step backward.

jacobs

A workaround for your workaround would be to do a cash flow report for your two accounts separately. So if you did a report for just one account, showing transfers outside the account, you’d see how much flowed into/out of that account. 

Yes, I know two reports is not as elegant as one — but would that get the job done, at least for the time being?