Category Reports not working - how to fix

cantatrice

So, I have my checking account and at least a dozen credit cards where every transaction is meticulously categorized.
I am trying to run a report showing what I have given to charity this year, by charity. The report does not pick up all the transactions for all the accounts. For example, there is one charity where I give $100/month on a particular credit card. The report only shows February-June. But there are transactions for January, July, August, September, etc. What is the fix?
Note I tried this both with my memorized report that I customized and as well by doing a category report where I only selected the charitable category but all accounts. Similar results. Many transactions are missing.

q_lurker

I would attack this from the top down.  

Begin with a Banking transaction report for this one account, all transactions -- do the transactions show up in the right place?

Customize the report to sort by Category -- do the transactions show up under the right category?

Customize the report to only that category -- Still there?

Expand the reports accounts to all (or more) accounts -- Still there?

Working through a series of time frame changes can also be helpful. 

If those steps don't produce something helpful, a file validation may be in order.  

Jim_Harman

Are you sure that the date range for the report is correct?

Tom Young

Any chance that the charitable transactions were somehow assigned to an incorrect Category?

If you run a Spending report using all Accounts and all Categories for the entire year do your "missing" charitable contributions show up somewhere on that report?

cantatrice

The date is set to year to date. I’ve never run a spending report but I can try that.
I checked and the charitable transactions are correctly categorized in the respective credit card account - but only some of them (not all) show up in the 2 reports I ran.

q_lurker

I would attack this from the top down.  

Begin with a Banking transaction report for this one account, all transactions -- do the transactions show up in the right place?

Customize the report to sort by Category -- do the transactions show up under the right category?

Customize the report to only that category -- Still there?

Expand the reports accounts to all (or more) accounts -- Still there?

Working through a series of time frame changes can also be helpful. 

If those steps don't produce something helpful, a file validation may be in order.  

cantatrice

Thanks for these good suggestions- I am digging further into the details.

Jim_Harman

When you created the new report, did you get the same results i.e. the same total amount or as you said "similar" results? 

Just to be sure, go to Tools > Category list, click on Show hidden categories at the bottom, and make sure you don't have two similarly-named categories for your charitable contributions.