My Wish List for Quicken Mac in 2020

glennmacc

I switched from QM 2007 to the new Quicken in June. It has mostly gone well, though it has taken many hours of work to recreate many of my previous reports using the new reports engine and cleaning up data that did not translate perfectly. Nonetheless, I am fairly happy with the new capabilities, but of course would like to have more. As we move into 2020, and it being the season for Wish Lists, here is mine for Quicken in 2020:

Features to Add:
1. I would like to see investment performance by security, account, type, etc. from and to specific dates (not just last 1, 3, 5 years, etc.).

2. I’d like to be able to see subtotals by year, category, payee etc. in transaction reports.

3. I’d like to have a “Previously Reconciled” window/register so you could see previous month’s reconciliations when something goes wrong or changes (similar to QM2007).

4. There is no way to make a dividend tax-free in a non-retirement account. For instance, Muni’s in a taxable account cannot be shown to be tax-free, except by use of tags. To see the total of tax-free income, you must tag each of them as “Tax-Free Dividend” and include them in a report through the tag portion of the customize tab in the new report generator. I’d like to see that changed.

5. There is an inconsistency in how Reinvested Dividends and Reinvested Capital Gains are treated. Reinvest Capital Gains cannot be included in budgeting. The only way to achieve this right now is to split a Reinvested Capital Gain into two transactions, as Capital Gain Income and then a security buy (as two separate transactions). This is strange because it is not the same as how Dividends are treated, where Reinvested Dividends can be included in the budget in one transaction because the category assigned to reinvested dividends is “Dividend Income”. The category automatically assigned to Capital Gains is “Reinvested Capital Gains which is not a budget category, and in fact does not seem to exist anywhere else in the program. Note: That might not be bad if someone is starting from scratch, but many of us updating from QM2007 or other programs have hundreds of those transactions and dividing them all into two transactions too time-consuming. So our budgets go without Capital Gains. I expect that this is problematic for those who rely on Capital Gains for their primary income.

Bug Fixes:
6. Account Status window when downloading transactions gives incorrect data (under “Details” about how many transactions were downloaded if an error or timeout occurs.


Suggestions:
1. Quicken should stop using the term “tax-free” in most instances. Almost always these are “tax-deferred” income, not “tax-free” (except tax-free bonds/municipal bonds).

2. Please make it easier to change account numbers like credit cards. The current way is extremely circuitous and non-intuitive (using Settings/Change Connection Type). With the security problems that many of us face, those numbers must be changed fairly often, and figuring out how to do this is difficult. At the least, add “Change Account Number” to the “Change Connection Type” window or something like that.

Thanks for your continued work on this and support of the Mac platform.

Steve29

I, too, am switching from Q2007 Mac. I've been using both programs for months now, comparing them. There are some things to like, but a lot of features are missing, particularly with regard to investments, and frankly, I'm not happy about that. Not all of the items you mention affect me, but several do and I strongly second them:

-- Tax Free Dividends do not separate out in category reports because there is no way to identify them as such when the transactions are made (except with tags, as you point out, which is an awkward workaround, at best).

-- No way to identify interest paid on individual bonds or CDs in an account. If the account has several CDs you can get a total of "cash" in the account, but not the interest on each. Again, you can do this with tags, but wow, what a pain to set that up.

-- No way to show "Amount Invested" in a security. Only Cost Basis, which includes dividends. Cost Basis is right for taxes, but Amount Invested can be very helpful for getting a sense of how much money you've made.

Agreed on both of these:

--I would like to see investment performance by security, account, type, etc. from and to specific dates (not just last 1, 3, 5 years, etc.).

I'd also like to see IRR for longer than 5 years. Five just isn't enough to judge performance.

--I’d like to be able to see subtotals by year, category, payee etc. in transaction reports.

And one, additional, super-basic thing. When you enter a transaction (of any kind, not just investments) Quicken quickly finds matching ones as you type and attempts to pre-fill with those. But if you happen to pause while typing, Quicken can freeze and you can wait many seconds for it to unfreeze. Or if you hit tab too quickly after it seems to have found a match, you can end up entering something else. Q2007 is much more positive, quick and definitive, and as a result, much easier to use.

Steve29

And another thing --
Tags become the only way to do a variety of things in reports that were trivial in Q2007. If that isn't going to change then at least let us apply tags to multiple transactions at once. I'm now changing a whole series of dividend transactions by adding "tax free" to each one. That's hundreds of clicks! A formula for repetitive motion injury (and frustration!)

smayer97

You really need to spend time looking through the IDEAs section of this site and add your votes to any EXISTING ideas. And if your idea does NOT exist, you can create a new one there for EACH INDIVIDUAL FEATURE, so others can also vote on your idea. The above list will not go very far as is.

I took the time to try to identify  a couple I could find to help along. You can add your VOTE to:

2. Add Subtotals, Ideally at the Bottom of Data/Reports

3. Track/store Prior Reconciled Statements/periods

First, click on each 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 THAT 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!

Steve29

Done. Went through a lot of it. Voted, starred some discussions. You can get very deep into the weeds with this.

And thanks for the hints. The problem -- which you are obviously aware of -- is that most people don't realize that they can vote and so most features only get a few votes. But one way or another Q2007 did much better with investments & reporting -- and some very basic things are missing. Anything Quicken does to improve that and bring them to feature parity would be good.

Thanks again for your input and suggestions.

glennmacc

> @smayer97 said:
> You really need to spend time looking through the IDEAs section of this site and add your votes to any EXISTING ideas. And if your idea does NOT exist, you can create a new one there for EACH INDIVIDUAL FEATURE, so others can also vote on your idea. The above list will not go very far as is.
>
> I took the time to try to identify  a couple I could find to help along. You can add your VOTE to:2. Add Subtotals, Ideally at the Bottom of Data/Reports
> 3. Track/store Prior Reconciled Statements/periods
>
> First, click on each 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 THAT 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!

smayer97: Yes, I've voted for these previously. But the items i've mentioned above are not listed and Steve29 is the first person who has seemed to acknowledge and understand these issues. I've mentioned them before in other posts, but have never had any response at all. I'm hoping Quicken Marcus reads this and understands the Reinvest Capital Gains issue, because again nobody has seemed to recognize this issue up til now and it seems so important. It is strange to me that Dividends and Capital Gains are treated so inconsistently, with no real work-around.

Steve29: Yes, I added "tax-free dividends" to about 500 entires. I needed the information and could not wait until this was solved. So there goes about 3 . hours of my life...sigh.

Also, I second the "amount invested" comment. Again, I've tagged each investment and have used that as a workaround, though it is not perfect either.

And the comment about IRR for longer periods is one of my key frustrations. When I said I'd like IRR to specific dates, I definitely meant including longer periods. I have had certain investments since 1994 and I like to understand how they have performed over the full length of my investment. I wrote a spread sheet that takes rolling 5 year periods and develops a weighted average for each period to give me an approximation every year-end, but clearly that is not perfect either.

And here is a new question: I have just updated my budget for the first time.
The budget engine in New Quicken is a rolling budget (not necessarily year by year) which I think might be better, but the one slightly annoying thing that this means is that you cannot change which categories you use in your budget in different years as they "rollover" each year. I guess you could still do a new budget each year, perhaps that is what is intended? Anyone have any experience or suggestions with this?

All this said, I am looking forward to 5.14 (the update is switched off for me right now) and the Quick-Fill and enhanced reports.


Glenn

smayer97

@glennmacc

glennmacc

Here's an update:

Today I noticed that I was charged for my renewal for Quicken Mac 2020.  That means I upgraded from QM 2007 one year ago today.  So I thought I’d look back at the changes/progress that has been made in that year. 

When I signed up (mainly because of Mac OS Catalina’s inability to run Quicken 2007), I was afraid that Quicken 2019 (at the time) was not going to be satisfactory at all.  I had heard stories…  As I wrote in a forum post a few months ago, the switch was fairly smooth and I was pleasantly surprised by the status of the program at the time.  I was especially impressed with the “All Transactions” line that allowed me to search for a huge variety of inconsistencies and errors in the database.  I spent lots of time cleaning up the file, and that has helped straighten out a lot of erroneous things I found in various reports and registers. 

As I learned more about the program, I did find some shortcomings.  Many of these have been addressed in the 6 releases that have happened since I signed on with 5.11.  These include many conveniences such as the new Payees and Rules memorization, the new sidebar changes, the new reports lists, etc.  A few added capabilities include an improving new report engine and report customization process and the improving Quick Pay/Check Pay (which I do not use yet, but hope to soon).  These are appreciated and helpful, as is the seemingly more reliable update process.

So overall, I congratulate Quicken for their continued support of QM2020 and the team who respond on the forums who seem responsive and dedicated to product improvement.  I would like to reiterate a few items that I’d like to see in the second half of 2020 from my wish list of December 2019. 

First, in general I’d like to see a focus on improved capabilities in the investment aspects of Quicken.  Such things as a wider variety and increased sophistication of Asset Classes (that should not be too hard) and the ability to determine IRR over specific (and longer) periods of time.  Other improvement in investments that I’d like to see would be an “X-Ray” of holdings (aggregating mutual fund holdings by account or something similar-I think QW does this through Morningstar) so you can analyze what you really own.

Another issue in investments is that there is no way to make a dividend tax-free in a non-retirement account. For instance, Muni’s in a taxable account cannot be shown to be tax-free, except by use of tags. To see the total of tax-free income, you must tag each of them as “Tax-Free Dividend” and include them in a report through the tag portion of the customize tab in the new report generator. I’d like to see that changed. 

Another thing that really should be addressed is that there is an inconsistency in how Reinvested Dividends and Reinvested Capital Gains are treated. Reinvest Capital Gains cannot easily be included in budgeting. The only way to achieve this right now is to split a Reinvested Capital Gain into two transactions, as Capital Gain Income and then a security buy (as two separate transactions). This is strange because it is not the same as how Dividends are treated, where Reinvested Dividends can be included in the budget in one transaction because the category assigned to reinvested dividends is “Dividend Income”. The category automatically assigned to Capital Gains is “Reinvested Capital Gains” which is not a budget category, and in fact does not seem to exist anywhere else in the program. Note: this might not be bad if someone is starting from scratch, but many of us updating from QM2007 or other programs have hundreds of those transactions and dividing them all into two transactions too time-consuming, so our budgets go without Capital Gains. I expect that this is problematic for those who rely on Capital Gains for their primary income.

In non-investment areas (banking), I’d still like to see a “Previously Reconciled” window/register so you could see previous month’s reconciliations when something goes wrong or changes (similar to QM2007).

But again, I appreciate the progress I have seen in the last year and look forward to 5.18 and beyond.  And yes, I have put these suggestions in the Ideas section of the forum or voted for similar existing ideas, this note is just my way to consolidate and reiterate those comments.

Glenn MacCullough

QM user since 1999

smayer97

You can add your VOTE to Track/store Prior Reconciled Statements/periods

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).

For some of the other ideas you request above, check out:

Product Ideas - Quicken for Mac

(If the triangle is black, your vote has already been counted.)

Your VOTES matter!