Why are debits in red only sometimes?

jhcliff

I have generated income/expense reports for two properties. On one report the debits are in red (correctly, I think). On the other report everything is in black, and I can find no way to change this. Any tips?

NotACPA

Which columns, exactly, have the black numbers in them?

And, can you post a redacted image of what you're seeing?  JPG is the preferred format.

jhcliff

Thanks for responding. Here are two category reports. Lately all I can generate are ones in black and white. I would prefer they look like the color one. Am I missing something simple here?

jacobs

@jhcliff  The answer is that there are two different generations of reports in Quicken Mac. When the re-written Quicken Mac hit the market 6 years ago, the reports were inherited from the 2010-era Quicken Essentials program which served as the code base for the current Quicken Mac. The reports were very limited and very configurable. 

The developers had many issues to tackle to bring Quicken Mac up to snuff, but starting in 2017, they began a major project to build an all-new reports engine and user interface. There have been incremental improvements over the past three years, to the point where the new reports satisfy many needs -- still awaiting investment reports and budget reports -- and now cover almost all the areas the old reports did. (I'd expect to see the old reports eliminated from Quicken in the not-too-distant future; it may be waiting for the developers to write converters from old to new reports to not disrupt too many users.)

That's all background... now, the answer to your question.  The old reports, like Quicken Essentials, had lots of splashes of color and graphs -- some of it useful, some of it candy-colored excess, as they tried to make that program look more like popular new personal finance program Mint, which Intuit had just acquired. Your report that shows Money In and Money Out, and shows money out in red, is one of these old reports. The modern reports engine does not include any graphs and does not print negative numbers in red. Why? We don't know. Maybe they felt it was more professional looking. I think there were also some complaints about the old reports using a lot of ink for people who have inkjet printers; notice how every line is shaded in blue.

At this time, there's no user control to change negative numbers to red. If that's important to you, you can export a report as a .csv file and open it in Excel or Numbers, where you can make negative values display in red quite easily. 

jhcliff

Well I guess that answers my question, thanks. I won't waste any more time trying to get my reports to match!