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.