Quicken for Mac v5.16 Released

jacobs

caram said:

*Preferences / "When saving new QuickFill rules, save:"*

I remember there was a discussion a while ago that intermediate options would eventually be allowed between the 2 current extremes: "category" and "all fields". Any idea when this might become available?

I do indeed have a need QuickFill to remember Category, Tags and Amounts, BUT NOT Memos.

I think Marcus has indicated elsewhere that they are not planning additional changes to QuickFill preferences. I'd guess they feel offering field-by-field options would suit some people but confuse or overwhelm more people.

In your case, you could go to Payees & Rules > QuickFill Rules and edit the rules for these recurring transactions: blank out the Memo field, then check the "Lock this rule to prevent changes to it when editing a transaction" checkbox, and Save. This will prevent the memo you enter on a transaction today from popping up the next time you use the same Payee with this rule, because the rule is locked with a blank memo field. Yes, it'll require a little editing time for the rules as you get started, but over time, most of your recurring Payees will be set up the way you want them.

I'd also note something about the memo file which might make this unnecessary. You say you don't want the memo field memorized and carried forward, which indicates you do use the memo field. When you enter a new transaction, you therefore go to the Memo field to type something. When you tab into the memo field, it highlights  previous transactions's memo, and as soon as you start typing anything, it deletes the old memo and replaces it with what you're typing. So it's no more work on your part whether the previous memo is there or not, because you're going to overtype what's there.

For instance, for my monthly electric bill, I put in the memo field the time period and amount of electricity used: "March-April (1,234 kWh)". When I enter the next month's electric bill, even though it auto-fills with last month's memo, as soon as I start typing in the memo field, it erases the old value -- there's not even any extra keystroke or click involved. So saving the QuickFill rule with a blank memo field wouldn't save me any time. (In this case, I sometimes lock and save the QuickFill rule with a 'template' memo for a transaction like this -- "month-month (xxx kWh)" -- to remind me to enter the memo in the same format each month.)

jacobs

caram said:

*Splits*

Splits seem to retain "all fields", even when only "category" is selected in Preferences. At least, this seems to be what happens when QuickFill rules are automatically created when moving from 5.13 to 5.16.

I just tried creating a new Payee with a split, and set it to Save QuickFill rule with Category only. The rule was recorded as expected: with the splits and amounts, but no memo/notes or tags. So I think the software is working as you'd expect and as designed.

Most likely what you're describing is a result of however they implemented the automatic building of rules when you jumped from 5.13 to 5.16. Since I no longer have 5.13 to test with, I can't confirm that.

If the way it auto-created QuickFill Rules for you in the conversion isn't what you'd like, you can go to the Payees & Rules > QuickFill Rules screen and select some or all of the rules and delete them. Then you can build up QuickFill rules according to your own preferences as you use transactions going forward.

Quicken Marcus

Best matches: Duplicate entries

Enter a new transaction, start typing the first few letters of an existing payee, the Best Matches popup appears, some entries are presented twice: the ones for which both a Payee and a QuickFill rule exists it seems. Is this really the intended behavior? It makes transaction entry a little cumbersome, because now I have to pause and think and select one of the two mostly indistinguishable transactions. There should only be 1 option presented to the user IMHO.

As RickO says, this is by design.  The goal is to allow you to reject any QuickFill option and simply enter the payee with auto-filling the other fields.

Quicken Marcus

Best matches: Unicode support (diacritics)

This seems to have improved since 5.13, but there's just one easy, extra step missing. Example:
1. Enter a new transaction, type "cafe" as Payee.
2. QM display "Café" as the best match (excellent!), but it's not selected. The option to "Create a new Payee" is instead. This is not the expected behavior. The expected behavior would be for "Café" to be selected.

I'm not able to reproduce this issue.  The "café" QuickFill option is automatically selected for me. Is this what you would expect?

Quicken Marcus

Splits

Splits seem to retain "all fields", even when only "category" is selected. At least, this seems to be what happens when QuickFill rules are automatically created when moving from 5.13 to 5.16.

When we auto-created QuickFill rules, we decided it was best to keep all information from previous split transactions because the amounts were important to preserve.  Since auto-creation was done in the first QuickFill release, we didn't have the ability to set preferences at the time so we just had to pick what we thought would work best for the majority of customers.

Quicken Marcus

caram said:

Preferences / "When saving new QuickFill rules, save:"
I thought there was a discussion that intermediate options would be allows between the 2 current extremes: "category" and "all fields". I need QuickFill to remember Tags and Amounts for most transactions (but not Memos). Any idea when this might be available?

There are definitely some customers who expressed an interest in this capability but overall it's a pretty small percentage of people.  At this time, we don't plan on adding the ability to automatically select individual fields to be memorized.  One suggestion is to use ⌘Y after you save your transaction and refine the QuickFill rule and delete the items you don't want.

Quicken Marcus

markrougeux said:

Re the "new" Cash Flow report, have you tried printing this or saving as a PDF? Again, the formatting is bad. The data is jammed against the left margin, and the lines beneath each total go all the way across the page. I'm happy you are trying to improve the reporting function, but I'm wondering who looks at this before it is published. There is such a long way to go before the reporting here approached Quicken 2007 for Mac. Someone who understands financial reporting needs to look at this. I'm happy to help you understand how financial reports should be created and formatted. Let me know.

Yeah, that is kind of ugly.  Let me see what we can do.  I'll reach out to you.

Rick2022

Regarding the quickFill rules. For most things in my checking account (credit card accounts auto download) I duplicate the last payment and change the date & amount. Then I get the correct name, category & memo. I edit the memo if needed but usually not needed.

Quicken Marcus

pmele said:

Update killed the ability to updates accounts for me. Get a general error about syncing failure. I have turned off sync and yet it still fails.

JoeyMaggard said:

I am having the same problem. Not updating any accounts. Also not able to report to Quicken. Trying to report gives back a check your internet connection and try again message. The error message is for my Mountain America Credit Union account, but none of my other accounts updated.

Please call Quicken Customer Care directly. It's free. If anyone asks you to pay, that's NOT Quicken. I'm not aware of any changes made around updating accounts so I don't think it's related to the 5.16 release.  I'm guessing both of these are related to specific issues with the bank connection that our care team has better tools and background information to be able to help you work through.

Pat13

Please change Quickfill on Quicken Mac so it is sensitive to the account into which transactions are downloaded. For example, I want Amazon transactions from one credit card to go to one category, and Amazon transactions from a second credit card to go to a second category. As is, if a transaction is from Amazon, Quicken Mac assigns the same category regardless of the credit card.

Tim W

One feature that was lost in 5.16 is in the Payees and Rules window, where the number of transactions used to be displayed. Clicking on that number would give a quick report on the transaction details; very convenient. Although the new reports are good to have, it now takes many steps to achieve what one used to be able to do with one click. Please bring that feature back!

JoeyMaggard

> @Quicken Marcus said:
> (Quote)
> (Quote)
> Please call Quicken Customer Care directly. It's free. If anyone asks you to pay, that's NOT Quicken. I'm not aware of any changes made around updating accounts so I don't think it's related to the 5.16 release.  I'm guessing both of these are related to specific issues with the bank connection that our care team has better tools and background information to be able to help you work through.

It wasn't 5.16 but 5.16.1 that broke account updating for me. The solution for me was to reset cloud account under Connected Services. Just make sure to let it finish. It took 5-6 minutes.

MKL

Do the new reports include a customizable actual vs. budget report? I really need to track my actual expenses against my budget for various timeframes but I don't see how to do that.

Shing

> @MKL said:
> Do the new reports include a customizable actual vs. budget report? I really need to track my actual expenses against my budget for various timeframes but I don't see how to do that.

No budget reports yet. The whole budget piece needs a lot of work to get it up to speed.

TomJF

Bug?! CATEGORIES under WINDOW now only shows 18 required categories. Normal categories such as Travel, Food, Utilities, etc. are not revealed.

TomJF

Would you please implement a keyword search routine for the Memo/Notes column. My database dates back to 1981 and I often want to check the purchase date and cost of principal items like refrigerator, washing machines, auto batteries, cars, etc. Keywords of many items are entered into the Memo/Notes column of my database.

Thanks Tom

jacobs

@TomJF  I'm not seeing what you're seeing. My Categories window shows 333 categories (I need to do some housekeeping!), same as before. Are you saying that your Categories window shows only 18 categories? Or that of all the Categories, only 18 are Required? Categories like Travel and Food aren't required categories, but they are typically there by default unless you've remove them. (By my count, there are 34 "required" Categories in Quicken.)

Are you sure there isn't something entered in the Search box at the top of the Categories window which is limiting what you're seeing? If not, can you enlarge the Categories window to show all the entires it is displaying, and capture and post a screen shot?

Garrett Jackson

I am happy to see continued improvement of the reports available. I really, really think you need to offer a flexible Spending vs. Budget report that can be customized for date ranges, account selection, and category selection. Look at what Quicken 2007 provided. With the new Quicken I can look at spending from any angle but my ability to look at spending vs budget is very limited and isolated to the planning tab. For example I would like to look at spending vs budget for a particular quarter. The bills are not all in right at the end of the quarter. By the time they are all in by the middle of the next month, you can't get a summary of the quarter spending, you can get a year to date but that isn't as useful for my purposes. I have been downloading the budget report in .csv format into Excel and manually editing it to get the report I want. You should provide this capability within the report tab.

michaelweinberg

I strongly second MKL's and Garrett Jackson's comments. Quicken Mac has made VERY SUBSTANTIAL progress since it started the subscription model (as I frequently point of on various Facebook and other online discussion groups), for which I am grateful. However, my major frustration is the inability to run a report showing my YTD actual against my TYD budget because of the fact that, by the time the expenses for month are in, the month is over and Quicken includes my next month's budget amounts in my YTD report. At a minimum, I'd like to be able to run that report as of the last day of the prior month (e.g., so that, on, say August 5, I can see how is did against budget from Jan 1 though July 31--right now, on August 5 I can only run a report showing how I am doing through August 31, which is not helpful since I will not have incurred most of my August expenses at that point).

caram

Talking about reports, I tried yesterday to obtain an account summary to be able to decide whether I could afford a certain financial investment, and I was surprised that that I could not quite do that.

I turned to the Accounts Summary report, which seemed the most appropriate, but besides taking a lot more screen estate that the sidebar which has mostly the same information, I could not select a subset of the accounts, nor group by something other than account type, nor export to Excel for later processing.

This would be great features to have and maybe this is something in the works already as you redesign the report area.

caram

@marcus, it would be great if this little editor box could be supercharged with markdown/html formatting buttons that web users have become accustomed to on most sites nowadays.

This would also make it easier for the team to read out reports that have better formatting in the first place.

jacobs

@caram  Are you talking about the editing box on this website? Marcus manages development of Quicken Mac, but isn't responsible for this website. As you may be aware, this forum website is a cloud-hosted platform from a company called Vanilla. Quicken's community website administrators can make some configuration changes, but only within what the Vanilla product allows. 

caram

> @Quicken Marcus said:
> As RickO says, this is by design.  The goal is to allow you to reject any QuickFill option and simply enter the payee with auto-filling the other fields.

Does this really make sense when the only remembered field is the Category and it's going to be replaced by the user anyway if necessary?

Furthermore, I've just noticed there could be more than one QuickFill rule per payee and, whilst I appreciate the power this gives us power users, I'm wondering if this is not an overkill for the majority of use cases. I'm now suddenly finding myself having to think on each transaction entry which of the myriads of QuickFills I want to use and whether I want to save this specific transaction as a quick fill, when my fingers just want to press away at entering the data with decades of ingrained habit.

Maybe this feature is just too new to me and I will quickly get used to it, but it's the first time that I've found something in QM that has not felt like a step forward from previous version of QM or Money. Or maybe I have the wrong default options selected.

caram

> @Quicken Marcus said:
> I'm not able to reproduce this issue.  The "café" QuickFill option is automatically selected for me. Is this what you would expect?

@marcus, you need to press an extra letter for the problem to appear. Press "e" instead of "é", and you will see "Café" is no longer selected, but "Create new Payee 'cafe'" is instead.

The correct behavior would be for "Café" to be selected always, whether I type "café" or "cafe".

caram

> @Quicken Marcus said:
> One suggestion is to use ⌘Y after you save your transaction and refine the QuickFill rule and delete the items you don't want.

@marcus, how about adding a few additional items to preference:
- category
- category & tag (<- NEW)
- category & amount (<- NEW)
- category & tag & amount (<- NEW)
- all fields

It sounds like it would be trivial to implement in the preference dialog and in QuickFill, since QM already has the underlying machinery.

caram

*Bills & Income / Schedule*

There is a date format discrepancy as highlighted in the example below. The same date is displayed using 2 different date formats (d/m vs. m/d). This is not just a display issue, but it may affect the decision you take based on the proximity of the date, depending on which date you look at.

Ideally, it's not just the Summary but also the Next 5 Payments that should be using the default macOS calendar.

TomJF

RickO: You are right. I had checked the show only unused. I now show 153 categories after unclicking as you suggested.

Thank you

TomJF

@RickO Thanks. This does work. I'm so used to performing this function easily and simply in QM2007 using "QkReport" that I had not worked out how to do it in the new Quicken. I greatly miss the the versatility and simplicity afforded by "QkReport" from QM2007.

smayer97

TomJF said:

@RickO Thanks. This does work. I'm so used to performing this function easily and simply in QM2007 using "QkReport" that I had not worked out how to do it in the new Quicken. I greatly miss the the versatility and simplicity afforded by "QkReport" from QM2007.

Of course just keep in mind that this only works for gathering data at the transaction level, meaning that it does not isolate any split lines that meet the memo search criterion. It also means that any total associated with the filtered data is at the transaction level and NOT at the split line level that matches.

Finally, it is currently not possible to save such a report.

All of this is quite different than QuickReports in QM2007, which is far more versatile and allows much more refinement and precision that is not possible in QMac currently.

This is one of the significant limitations of QMac right now (I have multiple reports that rely on that are based on Memo searches and totalling and subtotalling; all the powers of proper report formatting and manipulation).

caram

> @RickO said:
> Re HTML
> Isn't that what the </> symbol on the editing bar is for?

@RickO, you are privileged. The mere mortals like us don't have the </> on the editing bar.