Quicken Community is moving to Single Sign On! Starting 1/22/21, you'll sign in to the community with your Quicken ID. For more information: http://bit.ly/CommunitySSO
Ability to hide or toggle off the new feature in sidebar, Separate Accounts (Q Mac)
Michael Erb
Member ✭✭
I do not like to see superflous items in my Account List in the sidebar. I object to the introduction of the new "feature," Separate Accounts, which is always there with no ability to hide it. Please give users the ability to remove that or hide it or toggle it on or off.
12
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Looks like this "separate accounts" feature has been on the Windows version for many years, with people complaining about the same thing, so I assume this is here to stay on the Mac version.
To me, this keeps them out of sight the way I want most of the time. Bit I do need to occasionally look up some transaction in an old account, and this allows easy access when I do, versus the old approach of needing to go to Show & Hide Accounts, unhide the account, look up something, go back to Show and Hide Accounts, and re-hide the account.
@scubacat Are you saying that seeing this one line at the bottom of the sidebar is very disruptive and what you're so disappointed about? @jasontrout Is this not minimized enough to stay out of your way?
The main argument is that people say that they don't want to see any reference to those accounts. But they fail to see the other side of that discussion. And that is if they are totally hidden you will have other users that can't find them when they need them, but even more important is something that I have notice over time.
I can't tell by @jacobs screenshot but on the Windows side the hidden accounts line also shows the total amount.
This amount has proved to be important. Yes normally all the hidden accounts are closed, but being closed doesn't stop an accidental transfer to one of those accounts or other problems that change their total. By having a total of zero you can be sure nothing bad has happened in those accounts.
To make this argument true, the category should be named "Closed Accounts".
Just because some users have forgotten about the Accounts > Hide and Show Accounts function does not mean all users. Why punish those of us who know how to use the hide accounts function?
The idea of a side bar should be for items you view and use on a regular basis. Other functions and items are best left to subtopics of menus.
Hidden accounts should be not seen. Please, do not rewrite the dictionary.
And there's another important aspect which many users have asked for: the ability to Search for transactions in Hidden accounts without needing to unhide them, search, and re-hide them. Now that Hidden accounts are in the sidebar, transactions from Hidden (but not Separate) accounts are visible in the transaction register when you click All Transactions at the top of the sidebar, and Search will find transactions in the Hidden accounts. (I believe this will actually cause some users to be unhappy, and think the solution will be adding a toggle somewhere for Search to include/exclude Hidden accounts.)
Ultimately, they may need to add a Preference for whether Hidden and/or Separate accounts are visible in the left sidebar, but I know they try to avoid adding clutter with more preference settings that users might overlook.
I guess I'm still unclear from your response why seeing one line saying "Hidden Accounts $0" at the bottom of the sidebar is any annoyance, let alone something that makes this entire upgrade such a disappointment to you. To me, I rarely need to access my Hidden accounts -- but having one line at the bottom of sidebar is no big deal to me for the 99.8% of the time I don't care about them, and a nice convenience the 0.2% of the time I want to find an old transaction in a Hidden account.
As for having Hidden accounts which are not closed, that's still okay to do if it fits your needs. And if you never need to access Hidden accounts, you never need to click on it in the sidebar to expand the account list. I'm trying to understand why the presence of that one line at the bottom of the sidebar is an issue. For people who have been asking for easier access to Hidden accounts, for Hidden accounts with balances to be included in their Net Worth, and for the ability to Search in Hidden accounts, this is a win; if you don't care about any of that functionality, can't you just ignore the presence of the one line for Hidden accounts?
I have seen long drawn out arguments over the most trivial things, but for some people it is like their life depends on it, by the reactions you get.
It will be interesting to see how the Quicken Mac development reacts to the criticisms. I have noticed that the Mac side seems to be more flexible in this regard.
As in there is still value in knowing if the amounts are changing when you don't expect them to change.
If Quicken Inc, is allowed to redefine words, then why not call "Credit Cards" "Night Mares" and "Cash" could be "Dreams"? Hidden should not be seen.
They could give us a function to Hide categories. By right clicking on the category and select that as an option. The default could be to view the category. Similar to account edit function.
The idea of a side bar should be for items you view and use on a regular basis. Anything else clutters the experience. Other functions and items are best left to subtopics of menus. This is the way most applications work and provides the user a common look and feel. Why do you believe that Quicken should be different from other applications in this instance?
For me, to see items that I intended to be hidden is annoying and wrong for the reasons mentioned above.
@jacobs pointed out, that using a closed account does not throw an error. It should and this is BUG that needs to be fixed. By throwing an error upon entry of the transaction, the user would be informed at that time and the category balance change would not be needed. It would also make it easier for the user to locate and correct the error.
I just don't see how the presence of one line "clutters the user experience". There are many elements in Quicken I don't use, but their presence doesn't get in my way or make me unhappy. (And I like that I can now have quick access to my closed accounts when I'm trying to find a specific old transaction. To me, the previous user experience -- open a dialog box to view my accounts, click a check box to unhide an account, then find what I wanted, then open the dialog box to view accounts again, click the check box to re-hide the account, and click a box to close the window -- was annoying, and they've now made it much smoother.)
I personally hate anything that is "final". When such things are put in place the next day you find some reason why you need to make a change and then you can't.
In the Quicken Windows world if you use close account there isn't any away short of going to a backup of reversing that. It doesn't make the account read-only but it does put it on the hidden list and you can't change that or the status back to open.
For this reason I never use it. And in fact the whole idea of a closed account is relatively new in Quicken. I would say in the last 10 years or so. Before that you just disconnected from downloading and removed any reminders yourself and if you wanted hid it.
Closing an account was put in for the "novice".
If Quicken was a formal accounting package I can see where closing an account and still being able to change things in it as the right thing to do, but Quicken isn't sure an account package and should lean towards being flexible, not "formal".
BTW we do know that they know how to do this because the Starter version will free accounts if you don't renew the subscription.
TL;DR:
Project managers and their teams are people. People make mistakes, even in designing software. If a function is needed to maintain the integrity and usability of the application and it is missing, that is a bug. The user should be provided with the best possible product, regardless of the design specifications. If the design failed to include an add function, am certain you would say that is a bug. To allow a user to add a new transaction to what is supposed to be a closed account makes no sense. If you prefer, we could call it an enhancement. Either way it is needed.
One addtional line, for most people, would not be a hindrance. However, this sets a precedence and opens the application many more just-one-line-added. They did not add just one line. They also added Separate Accounts category. The view point of just-one-of-anything has rarely worked out in the long run. If we are to go down this road then lets open this up and allow users to add custom categories. That way I can have my Dreams and Night Mares categories and change the name from Hidden to Whatever.
The addition of Separate Accounts is understandable, especially with your view of Quicken. I see future nightmares for Quicken. These could be easily resolved with multiple Quicken files and a new category in the side bar to allow a user to select Quicken files. But, that wasn't the option they choose. When users ask for reporting functions and other functions (that are not present) in Quicken for these accounts, it will be much harder to implement. Users maybe forced to export and create new Quicken files. When they should have been given a means to create these files within their current Quicken file. That would have provided all of Quicken and not forced a lot of recoding later. In the short term Separate Accounts is a good feature. In the long term it is a nightmare waiting to happen.
Right clicking the account bar gives this menu.
And the reason I point at the Show Credit Score is because it can be totally hidden.
And @d on the Separate becoming a nightmare it hasn't on Windows for a simple reason the only place this is used is the account bar. It doesn't apply anywhere else including the reports. The hiding of accounts is a different matter, there is an option for hiding account on the menu and reports, but for "separate" accounts one would have to customize a report and remove the accounts the don't want.
How is an account "Hidden" if it's right there on the sidebar? There are lots of reasons it may be desirable to put an account in that category, and visit it occasionally. Hidden and Separate do not mean closed, nor do they necessarily amount to zero. Just because something works for one person does not mean it works for everybody, and allowing an option for these things to be out of view - off the sidebar - shouldn't be that difficult.
Listen to your users Quicken and do the right thing or you might end up losing paid users.
I hate this new feature. In the recent previous version of Quicken (just a few days ago before the update), I had two accounts in Hide in Reports. Now Hide in Reports is no longer available. It became Separate Accounts. I have to hide those two accounts to keep them out of Accounts Summary otherwise it's double counting and my net worth goes wacky.
But there's no other way to categorize or hide/show those two accounts for what I need. They should not be hidden because they're regularly downloading transactions and I'm always looking at them.
I only want to hide them in reports. I don't want them relegated to the bottom of the sidebar.
After going through the accounts and turning off what was made separate, it has some utility. It just requires clean-up by the user which is going to freak out and confuse people at first. So.....I get what the design team was trying to do, but it's going to be painful for some at first.
More troubling is that my net worth changed when this feature was added, so now I don't know if I should be trusting the calculations. I'm going to be spending hours (most likely multiple) reviewing every single account I had stopped using/tracking to try and get it binned the way Quicken apparently thinks it should, and I don't understand what benefit I'm getting from this? What problems were being solved?
Frankly, I wish Quicken would spend less time on "improvements" like this and bill pay, and more on investment tracking and analysis.
As to why they did this, it's because while some users don't want to see closed accounts, some users have asked for this exact functionality. As well as separate accounts, to see data they're tracking for a child/parent/business but not include it in their Net Worth. (And also: Quicken Windows has features similar to this.) And, importantly, this change also allows the Search feature to find transactions in closed accounts (which were previously not searchable because you couldn't open them to view their transactions unless you un-hid them).
The apparent solution to conflicting wishes is to create a preference setting, to allow everyone to have it the way they want it. I think the developers try to avoid creating extra preferences because some users won't know they're there and will be even more confused. So they try to implement features they think everyone will be okay with, and then listen to feedback to see if they need to make iterative changes to the feature. Most recently, the way QuickFill rules worked took a few iterations until the developers agreed to add preference settings they initially stated weren't needed.