This Must Be Possible, Right?? (Tax reports in Q Mac)

Scott Schmidt

Folks - I was doing my taxes yesterday and I wanted to create a report showing interest/dividends/cap gain distributions for selected securities, subtotaled by security, for a given time period. Easily done in Quicken Mac 2007, and it also appears to be hard-coded in the Tax Schedule canned report (under Schedule D, except that all securities are shown along with all of the other tax-related information. When I try to even modify the canned tax report using the "Customize" button, it's impossible to pare it down to anything smaller, except for date range.

I'm still new to QM2019, and this is my first time doing my routine tax reporting with it. But for the life of me, I can't find a way to make it create a report like this. It must be possible, right? Right?

Please let me know if you know how to accomplish this (very basic and essential) task, that any personal finance software program should be able to do. Thanks!

jacobs

@Scott Schmidt The reports in Quicken consist of two different generations: (1) the ones which were originally created for the 2010-era Quicken Essentials, the code from which was used in building the current Quicken Mac , and (2) the "new" reports which have been developed over the past few years around an all-new reports engine and user interface.

The ones in the bottom section of the Reports menu are the old reports; the ones above those are the new reports:



The old reports don't have much configurability, although some have been tweaked over the years -- and as you see, the Tax Schedule report is one of those old ones.

The developers are slowly in the process of continuing to add new features and capabilities to the new reports, and as they completely surpass the old reports, you'll see the old reports start to disappear from the program. The old Category Summary report is likely the first of the old reports to be removed, since it has some bugs that can cause data to be omitted -- and is completely surpassed by the new Transaction and Summary reports.

Over time, we'll likely see some of the other old reports replaced and removed. I'd expect (hope?) a modern balance sheet/net worth report, to replace the Net Worth Over Time and Account Summary, will follow next. The Tax Schedule report is likely a complicated one to re-write, but the hope is that all the old reports will be replaced with modern versions using the new reports engine and configuration user interface -- it's just unknown how long that will take midst their other priorities.

That's a long-winded explanation about how we got here and where things are going and why you can't currently customize the Tax Schedule report in the way you want.

It seems to me if you want information by security, you can get there with little extra work. Set the Tax Schedule to Summarize by Category, and then Export to a CSV file. With a little work in Excel or Numbers, you can separate and sort investment income by security. 

J_Mike

Unfortunately there is no QMac report template that accomplished your objective.

I assume that one of your objectives is to reconcile QMac to your various 1099 forms - e.g., adjust dividend amounts for foreign taxes paid, etc.

The best I have been able to come up with is to use the filtering and sorting capabilities of the account transaction registers.
With the account register open and Date Range set to Last Year.
Filter the register for a given security - enter security name (or symbol) in the Search box.
This results in a register display of all security activity for the time period.
Sort the filtered register by Category.
Select (highlight) the block of transactions (e.g., Dividends) and examine the block total at upper-right.

Tedious?? - yes it is!!

There is also a serious drawback to this procedure if one has reinvested income transactions. The transactions will display in the filtered view but the Amount column displays zero and thus these transactions are not included in the total.
Do not have a ready answer for this one.

Not a good answer - but the best I have come up with so far.

jacobs

@Scott Schmidt The reports in Quicken consist of two different generations: (1) the ones which were originally created for the 2010-era Quicken Essentials, the code from which was used in building the current Quicken Mac , and (2) the "new" reports which have been developed over the past few years around an all-new reports engine and user interface.

The ones in the bottom section of the Reports menu are the old reports; the ones above those are the new reports:



The old reports don't have much configurability, although some have been tweaked over the years -- and as you see, the Tax Schedule report is one of those old ones.

The developers are slowly in the process of continuing to add new features and capabilities to the new reports, and as they completely surpass the old reports, you'll see the old reports start to disappear from the program. The old Category Summary report is likely the first of the old reports to be removed, since it has some bugs that can cause data to be omitted -- and is completely surpassed by the new Transaction and Summary reports.

Over time, we'll likely see some of the other old reports replaced and removed. I'd expect (hope?) a modern balance sheet/net worth report, to replace the Net Worth Over Time and Account Summary, will follow next. The Tax Schedule report is likely a complicated one to re-write, but the hope is that all the old reports will be replaced with modern versions using the new reports engine and configuration user interface -- it's just unknown how long that will take midst their other priorities.

That's a long-winded explanation about how we got here and where things are going and why you can't currently customize the Tax Schedule report in the way you want.

It seems to me if you want information by security, you can get there with little extra work. Set the Tax Schedule to Summarize by Category, and then Export to a CSV file. With a little work in Excel or Numbers, you can separate and sort investment income by security. 

J_Mike

Unfortunately there is no QMac report template that accomplished your objective.

I assume that one of your objectives is to reconcile QMac to your various 1099 forms - e.g., adjust dividend amounts for foreign taxes paid, etc.

The best I have been able to come up with is to use the filtering and sorting capabilities of the account transaction registers.
With the account register open and Date Range set to Last Year.
Filter the register for a given security - enter security name (or symbol) in the Search box.
This results in a register display of all security activity for the time period.
Sort the filtered register by Category.
Select (highlight) the block of transactions (e.g., Dividends) and examine the block total at upper-right.

Tedious?? - yes it is!!

There is also a serious drawback to this procedure if one has reinvested income transactions. The transactions will display in the filtered view but the Amount column displays zero and thus these transactions are not included in the total.
Do not have a ready answer for this one.

Not a good answer - but the best I have come up with so far.

ninaz

As I said in another thread, I don't understand why you would create the new reports without a way to sub-total. The old summary report allowed the use of tags to sub-total. Is that ever going to come back? Is there somewhere to vote for that to be added to the new reports?

I understand that you can filter to group by tag in the new report, but it doesn't sub-total.

I really need to be able to sub-total categories by account for things like interest.

For this year, I am continuing to use the old summary report. @Scott Schmidt have you tried using that report? I know there say there have been problems with that old version. I have not found it yet.

jacobs

@ninaz We're not the programming team here; we're fellow users -- so we can't answer why they did it the way they did.

There is an existing Idea thread for subtotal functionality here; please vote for it (click the little gray up arrow under the vote count in the blue box). The developers have been slowly adding functuonality to the new reports engine and interface over the past several years, so we can hope that this is still on their to-do list -- but there's no way to know if or when this functionality will get added.

ninaz

@jacobs Thank you. I think I meant the generic you, like why would any programmer...? I can't quite find one that fits the sub-totals I was referring to, so I think I started a new request earlier today. https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7870391/sub-totals-in-reports/p1?new=1
The one I saw was sub-totals by month, I think.

smayer97

Can you give an example layout about how you envision your subtotals to look? You can add it to your new IDEA thread to contain the info together.

ninaz

@smayer97 @Quicken Marcus Here are a couple of screenshot without the totals using the old Category summary report using tags.

smayer97

It seems like both your examples have the data cut off so there is not much to show what you are after.

BTW, I suggest posting any more examples in your IDEA thread here:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7870391/sub-totals-in-reports/p1

ninaz

I purposely cut off the totals, because I didn't want to post them. Figured you would understand that each group is subtotaled. I am sending this to Marcus in an email.

smayer97

It is not just the totals that cut off...