Quicken Mac suddenly not automating amount entry from previous months

Mark Carlson

My favorite thing about Quicken has always been that I'd enter a payee or income source in my bank account or credit card account, and the amount last paid automatically would appear. All of a sudden, as of today, 2/3/20, this no longer happens. I am having to reenter the amounts from scratch, and it's driving me crazy. What a time waster! Why doesn't Quicken work like it always has in this regard? Is this considered an improvement somehow? If so, I do not understand how it is at all.

jacobs

@Mark Carlson It sounds like you're describing the effect of the new QuickFill functionality in the latest release. There has been extensive discussion about this in the "Quicken for Mac v5.14 Released" thread. You might be interested to read the comments by the Quicken Mac product manager here and here, in which he explains why the current release was programmed the way it was, and what they are doing to change it in the next release.

In brief, they did a survey of beta users which told them the vast majority of users did not like having amounts and memos and tags carried over from past transactions, so they made the initial implementation of QuickFill not include them. They always planned to go back to add the option for those who did want it, but the timing of their release schedule precluded having all the options initially -- and they wanted to see whether this was, truly, important to a segment of the user community. They have heard the outcry from some of us, and they are implementing changes for the next release.

Whether you agree of disagree with their methodology, it's fortunate we are able to provide feedback here and have the product manager who makes the decisions read them, respond to explain why they did what they did, and tell us what they're going to change in the future; not many software companies offer that level of access and information.

jgreenkee88

Mine resets the amount due each month to the entire balance EVERY.SINGLE. TIME. I have to reset the amount due each month each time it's downloaded into the register. Total waste of time!

Mark Carlson

Ugh! How frustrating! I wonder why a computer program is so inconsistent!

jacobs

@Mark Carlson It sounds like you're describing the effect of the new QuickFill functionality in the latest release. There has been extensive discussion about this in the "Quicken for Mac v5.14 Released" thread. You might be interested to read the comments by the Quicken Mac product manager here and here, in which he explains why the current release was programmed the way it was, and what they are doing to change it in the next release.

In brief, they did a survey of beta users which told them the vast majority of users did not like having amounts and memos and tags carried over from past transactions, so they made the initial implementation of QuickFill not include them. They always planned to go back to add the option for those who did want it, but the timing of their release schedule precluded having all the options initially -- and they wanted to see whether this was, truly, important to a segment of the user community. They have heard the outcry from some of us, and they are implementing changes for the next release.

Whether you agree of disagree with their methodology, it's fortunate we are able to provide feedback here and have the product manager who makes the decisions read them, respond to explain why they did what they did, and tell us what they're going to change in the future; not many software companies offer that level of access and information.

Mark Carlson

Aha! Thank you so much for this information. This change came out of the blue for me, and it was/is quite frustrating. Yesterday, I had to enter information for a pension deposit I receive monthly, and it and its various split entries are exactly the same each month—that is, after a slight change as of January 1. I had to correct the information each of three times. I truly hope they will correct this soon.

Again, thank you!

Mark

jacobs

@Mark Carlson For transactions which have static information -- memos and amounts that don't change from month to month -- you can make them a QuickFill transaction right now with. Go to Window > Payees & Rules, click on the QuickFill Rules tab, and see if a rule exists for the Payee already. If so, you can edit it to add the memo and/or amount; if not, you can create a new rule. The next time you use this payee, all the information in your QuickFill rule will be entered automatically.

If you instead want Quicken to auto-populate the memo and/or amount from the latest previous transaction for a Payee, as it used to do, this is something you'll have to wait for until the next release.