Net worth over time report mystery mismatch

nhuddleston

Quicken Mac 5.15.3 Build 515.33035.100

In a Net worth over time report, the value of one investment account for each month after November 2019 was consistently off, more than $100k over the actual value, which was displayed correctly in the account sidebar. The excess turned out to match the amount of a sell/buy transaction in the account -- one security (call it "A") was sold, another ("B") bought for the same amount on the same day, no change in account value. After I deleted and replaced the Sell and Buy transactions, most of the excess value disappeared from the Net Worth report.

Most, but not all. Now the report's value for this account was over by the amount security B had lost since I bought it, about $4k, despite several interim prices in the price history. I deleted and replaced the only other transaction involving security B since November (a tiny sale of a share fraction to cover fees) and most of the remaining excess disappeared.

Most, but not all. Still over by about $14, an amount I couldn't correlate with anything. I ended up replacing all the transactions that had occurred since November, regardless of the security involved, and now the total's over by just pennies. I'm calling that good enough and moving on, baffled as to why only this account is off at all. Even other investment accounts involving the same securities are reported correctly.

Anyone run into something similar?

John L1

I have this problem also.  One of my IRA's is over $2k greater than what the Net Worth Over Time report shows.  Oddly, the normal "Net Worth" report (no graph) shows the number correctly.  There is no correlation to any transaction or difference of transactions from the month this problem crept in that I can find.  Tried redoing all the transactions since this occurred to no avail.  Any help would be much appreciated!

Quicken September

Hello, @nhuddleston & @"John L1"! 

Thank you both for reaching out to the Community to report this issue. I'm sorry to hear that you two are experiencing this and we apologize for any trouble this error has caused you. If you wouldn't mind, would you please try Restoring a Backup from before this issue presented itself, Updating All Online Accounts to build back your history, and then checking these same reports to see if this issue is replicable?

This will be important in understanding what is going on with this particular error. Once you have tried this, please get back to us with the results so that we may continue diagnosing and troubleshooting this odd behavior. Thank you!

-Quicken September

jacobs

My recommendation is to not use the Net Worth Over Time report. That is one of the original carry-over reports from Quicken Mac's predecessor, the 201-era Quicken Essentials, and people have reported bugs with this report for some time. The developers have not addressed problems with this report because it has been replaced by the modern reports engine Net Worth reports; I believe they will eventually remove the Net Worth Over Time report, but they have to write a converter to move users' existing reports to the newer Net Worth reports.

While they lack the little bar graph at the top, the modern Net Worth reports do not suffer from data irregularities.

Bottom line: if you are using Net Worth Over Time, stop. Create the report you need using any of the other Net Worth reports.

John L1

I'd be happy to use some other report, but what report will give me the monthly graph of Net Worth that I am looking for?  I don't want the pain of exporting the data to Excel - I just want a graph rather than columns of monthly data.  Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

jacobs

Well, none of the reports with the modern reports engine create graphs. So while I know this isn't what you want to hear, these are your options:

(a) using the old, deprecated report known to have data errors;
(b) using the new reports engine and be assured of getting correct data, but with no graph; or
(c) using the new reports engine and exporting the report to a spreadsheet if you really want a graph.

Personally, I never used graphs in the old versions of Quicken, as I prefer to see the numbers. I feel I generally know the trend or direction of my net worth, so a line graph doesn't tell me much, but the actual numbers help me quickly quantify the gains or losses. I understand that we all use Quicken differently, and you might feel exactly the opposite. 

You can take a moment to add your vote for a feature enhancement to add graphing to reports by clicking on this link; in the yellow box under the first post, click the little black arrow under the vote counter to add your vote. The developers have been focused over the past few years on adding reports which were previously missing and adding to the flexibility of what you can include/exclude in reports — things you just couldn't do until they added these features. I'm guessing that because graphing can be done in a spreadsheet, they viewed adding graphing to Quicken Mac as a lower priority — but that doesn't mean they won't get to it at some point. There are so many feature requests, they prioritize things they think will impact the most people. That's where voting on Idea posts here gives users a small way to influence the developers' priorities; the Ideas that garner more votes have the potential to be moved forward on the development roadmap.

John L1

Thanks for the feedback - yeah I figured exporting was the only way this was going to happen.  I've voted for the enhancement but my experience with Quicken listening to the voice of those upvotes has been very good so far.  I've been asking for Lifetime Planner to return to Mac for YEARS and still no luck even though it seems like an easy port from Windows.  I'm still bamboozled by the fact that they just don't have one codebase and use a multi-platform compiler rather than try to keep such separate sets of code.

jacobs

@John L1 Quicken Windows has been developed over 30 years in a number of different programming environments, and maintaining it is a delicate art; moving to a single cross-platform codebase would basically require rebuilding the whole thing from the ground up. In the long run, that might be good, using all modern tools and replacing the rickety house of cards that's too easy to break with a new, solid foundation. 

But… take a look at the state of Quicken Mac. The re-written version debuted in 2014, after about two years of work building on top of the codebase of the 2010 era Quicken Essentials. Give or take a bit, it's been more than 10 years of work to get to where we are today. Now, a few of those were lean years with a tiny development team, but you get the point: even after all that time, the developers still have a long list of features users want, either from the legacy Quicken Mac or from Quicken Windows.

Even given a larger programming team with more resources, it would take many, many years to re-write Quicken Windows and Quicken Mac to run on a common codebase. If after all that time and money, if they did everything exceptionally well, they'd be about where things are today. Where's the ROI on that multi-million dollar project? Maybe there's a ROI over many years into the future for being on a unified codebase, but I just don't think they could undertake such a rewrite from the ground up of both their primary platforms. the cost, the time, the disruption… it would be too much. Additionally, it's worth pointing out that both Quicken Mac and Quicken Windows depend heavily on tools and frameworks in their native operating systems, so moving to something cross-platform would require giving up using those native tools and coding a lot more from scratch. It's possible, to be sure, but it would be a huge, long, expensive undertaking with limited perceived benefit from customers, and I just don't see it happening.

The Lifetime Planner, from what I understand from some longtime Windows users, is an example of some very old code which isn't even maintained in Quicken Windows because it was developed with old tools/languages/compilers no longer used. So the Quicken Mac development team couldn't just make an "easy port" from Quicken Windows. They could look at what it looks like, but they'd have to build it from scratch, around the Quicken Mac's database and using their current Mac development environment. This is one of the things I think they'll get to eventually, but not until they fill in more of the functionality gaps between Mac and QWin that are more fundamental to the program.

And I agree that voting for ideas here can feel like an exercise in frustration because things seem to move so slowly. But I'd note that there are more than 600 Idea posts for Quicken Mac on this site, in addition to ongoing infrastructure projects and re-writes of old code just to tread water and support adding more features. When I look back at Quicken Mac from 4 or 5 years ago, as I sometimes do when helping users on older versions of the software, I do appreciate that they have actually made a lot of progress over the years — even though there remain many things I wish they would tackle tomorrow. And I do get the idea that the development team listens to the customer base about what the program needs; unfortunately, they have to make many tough choices about what areas of the program get love and which get ignored each year.

jasonp_austin

I'm also seeing this Net Worth Over Time discrepancy. Quicken - please fix. Using Quicken Deluxe (mac) 6.5.1 (Build 605.42638.100) on macOS 12.1