Reports on Quicken Mac - not clear what's available and how flexible it is

Bill Houghton

I am coming in as treasurer for a small 501(c)(3) nonprofit (income below $50,000), a community choir supported predominantly by choir member donations. The current treasurer uses Quicken for financial records and also creating some paper records that may be redundant. I’ll need to be able to track the following transactions:
1) donations by choir member name, with address (for purposes of the end-of-year letter for their tax purposes), as well as anonymous donations;
2) other occasional sources of income (e.g., performances at community events);
3) payments made to the choir director and occasional supporting musicians, in varying amounts;
4) business expenses.

I’ll also need to produce the following reports:
1) Annual member donations by name and total, for preparation of a letter
2) Annual income and expense totals for tax purposes
3) Cumulative income/expense totals throughout the year
4) Income tracking by week or month to evaluate income trends

Does Quicken support this kind of reporting flexibly? I get the impression from reading some of the posts that it has a standard set of reports, and other reports require exporting data to something like Excel. I could do all the above on Excel directly, I think; but it would make for pretty big worksheets.

I wasn't able to get a clear sense of the software's capabilities, and roaming around on the website always just leads to the sales page; and chat wasn't responding when I tried that.

John_in_NC

Obviously, the devil is in the details in how things are categorized and or tagged. I (or perhaps you) don't know that, so I cannot answer with certainty. 

But, you should be able to prepare what you want if things are properly categorized.

The only thing you won't be able to do is trends-that you will have to export to Excel for. But, that capability makes pretty much any report possible if you are savvy with the program.

But, yes, you should be able to accomplish what you want.

jacobs

I've been a treasurer for a small national non-profit organization with annual dues and conference registrations for member institutions. I was able to do most of the things you asked about with Quicken, and as John notes above, a lot depends on how you record the data.

That said, I did my tracking also using a FileMaker Pro database because I needed to produce invoices, and although there was some overlap and duplicate data entry, it was easier to manage payment tracking and create more flexible reports. I'm not sure how you'd track member addresses in Quicken in a useful format for generating tax receipts; tracking various forms or revenues and expenses and reporting on them will be easy with Quicken.

John_in_NC

Obviously, the devil is in the details in how things are categorized and or tagged. I (or perhaps you) don't know that, so I cannot answer with certainty. 

But, you should be able to prepare what you want if things are properly categorized.

The only thing you won't be able to do is trends-that you will have to export to Excel for. But, that capability makes pretty much any report possible if you are savvy with the program.

But, yes, you should be able to accomplish what you want.

Bill Houghton

I'm pretty competent on Excel, although, if I decide to get fancy and include graphics with any reports on trends, I'll have to refresh myself on how to do that. The comments I've been reading online imply that the current version of Quicken for the Mac has a limited number of standard reports and not much flexibility for custom reports. Is that an accurate assessment of the reporting capabilities?

jacobs

I've been a treasurer for a small national non-profit organization with annual dues and conference registrations for member institutions. I was able to do most of the things you asked about with Quicken, and as John notes above, a lot depends on how you record the data.

That said, I did my tracking also using a FileMaker Pro database because I needed to produce invoices, and although there was some overlap and duplicate data entry, it was easier to manage payment tracking and create more flexible reports. I'm not sure how you'd track member addresses in Quicken in a useful format for generating tax receipts; tracking various forms or revenues and expenses and reporting on them will be easy with Quicken.

Bill Houghton

Thanks. This has been helpful.