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In a recent customer survey, the ability to budget transfers was ranked in the top 20 features requested. This is an important feature for a number of situations. For example, you can use it to track deposits to savings and retirement accounts when preparing for retirement or to track withdrawals coming from retirement accounts once you have retired. You may also use it to track transfers to an account used for a specific purpose, such as to a vacation account or to a child's account that you do not otherwise track.
In the budget category picker, you'll find new Transfer In and Transfer Out items so you can choose what specific transfers you want to track.
We've updated the old Online Payment tab in the register and renamed it Bill Pay. It used to work only with Bank Bill Pay but we have enhanced it so it also supports Quick Pay and Check Pay. This should make it easier to pay your bills from within Quicken.
Under Bills & Income, we've had a Recently Paid and Recently Deposited section that appeared on the right side of the screen. Sometime this view would get hidden and customers couldn't find a way to make it reappear or on small screens, it took up too much room so one couldn't see the bills they wanted to pay. To solve this we've created a new tab called Activity where you'll find all recently paid bills and scheduled deposits to your accounts. Now there's a single, easy to use, location to review your paid bills. A blue dot appears on the tab if there's something new to check out.
In the last release, we added the ability to group hidden, separate, and closed accounts on the sidebar. This was to allow people to continue to search for transactions in closed accounts but getting them out of the way so you didn't have to see them all of the time. It also allowed one to designate an account as Separate so it didn't get included with one's personal accounts if you also oversaw your kids or elderly parent's accounts. A number of customers expressed an interest to go back to the old design where a hidden account was really hidden so we've added Account Display options in the sidebar preference menu. Just click on the three dots and select which type of accounts you want to hide or show. Note that this is a Mac-only setting and, if synced, these accounts will still appear as hidden or separate on web, and mobile.
We continue to work on improving reports. In a previous release, we adopted the model where one could customize the disclosure triangles in a report to show or hide specific sections of a report. When Quicken printed or exported the report, it would honor the disclosure triangles and only show sections if they were expanded. This gave people greater control over how they wanted a report to print or export but also made it hard to reset the display back to a default state. Now we've added a new Table Options button that gives you the Expand All and Collapse All feature to make it easier to expand or collapse the disclosure triangles.
Also new in reports is a report description that provides more information on what the standard reports are tailored for and what elements make up the report. You can also add custom descriptions to your own reports.
If you find issues in this release, please put a comment in this post. We'll be monitoring the comments in this specific article for a couple of weeks so we can move quickly to fix any problems that come up. If you're seeing connectivity issues, it is most likely not related to this release. Please contact support or search notices about bank outages. We didn't change anything in that area of the product in this release.
Thanks,
The Quicken Mac Development Team
I've seen this posted a lot across this community and it's misleading. In accounting ALL cash movements are essentially transfers and they can, and usually should, be categorized. The issue is really that Quicken counts categories as 'external accounts' rather than accommodate payees (which is really the external 'account') and therefore Quicken itself violates many accounting rules because of this. This may be pedantry, but the idea you should not be allowed to organize your transfers in a taxonomical manner (which is essentially the definition of categorization) is somewhat odd.jacobs said:
@aaron, the developers have previously said that they will not support categorization of transfers going forward, because that does violate the rules of accounting. I understand why you'd like to change the order or placement of the loan payment transfer in the budget, but this at least lets you include it in your budget.
Zoolook, I think something might be set up incorrectly in your scheduled transactions, or possibly we have a bug because I've never seen what you're describing. Bills show you scheduled transactions that have yet to be marked as paid. Activity will only show you scheduled transactions that have already been paid. A single instance of a scheduled transaction will only show up in one place and not both. Could you accidentally have multiple scheduled transactions for the same payee? If you look under Projected Balance you will see all your scheduled transactions in a single place. Do you have multiple scheduled transactions for the same payee?Zoolook said:The Bills / Payees / Activity tabs are a mess. If you have something as a Bill and is in the scheduled payees list, it will post to your register twice. Not only that, but the actions on each screen are different.
My Amex bill (which I scheduled via Quick Pay) shows in my register twice. Under bills it says "Due in 14 days" and "Scheduled" and the option to "Mark as Paid" on the far right box (should I do this, is it paid, or should I wait until it's actually paid?) Whereas under Payees where it also shows as Scheduled, the available action is "Pay with Bank Bill Pay" - it doesn't seem to know I've already scheduled the payment.
A check I pay to the building maintenance on a scheduled basis shows as "Delivered" in the activity tab, but "due in 7 days" in the bills tab and in the payees tab it just says "paid". Perhaps the columns could have "last paid" and "next due date" as dates, so it's clear when a status refers to the last payment or the next due payment.
I think you should unify the bills and payees sections so you don't accidentally pay the same bill twice.
Zoolook, Quicken does support transfers in reports now. Have you given it a try? Look under the Advanced tab in the Customize Report dialog. Quicken Mac theoretically does support transfers on categories but we're going to remove that capability in the not too distant future because it's not supported by the Quicken Cloud and Quicken Windows. I can see your argument that it would be useful and Quicken Windows supports tax line items on transfer transactions to support tax reporting which is a kind of category on a transfer so there's a use case. However, the bottom line is the Mac product must line up with the rest of the Quicken ecosystem. This decision was made at the highest levels of our company so it's not going to be revisited.Zoolook said:I've seen this posted a lot across this community and it's misleading. In accounting ALL cash movements are essentially transfers and they can, and usually should, be categorized. The issue is really that Quicken counts categories as 'external accounts' rather than accommodate payees (which is really the external 'account') and therefore Quicken itself violates many accounting rules because of this. This may be pedantry, but the idea you should not be allowed to organize your transfers in a taxonomical manner (which is essentially the definition of categorization) is somewhat odd.jacobs said:
@aaron, the developers have previously said that they will not support categorization of transfers going forward, because that does violate the rules of accounting. I understand why you'd like to change the order or placement of the loan payment transfer in the budget, but this at least lets you include it in your budget.
I categorize almost all of my transfers, partly to work around the shortcoming of Quicken's lack of including transfers in reports, but also because categories allow an aggregation point to see the bigger picture. If I am contributing money from several accounts (via transfers) to an investment strategy, or paying down a debt, or funding some longer term goal, being able to categorize those disparate transfers under one umbrella would be useful. Sure I could do this with tagging, and may actually do that at a later date, but there are different issues with tagging (lack of hierarchies for instance) that cause other issues.
We've had a number of discussions about what constitutes a change that requires creating a custom report and what changes will automatically be captured by the default report. We've landed but haven't implemented the idea that the presentation or look of a report should NOT be a change that requires creating a custom report as long as we give customers a quick and easy way to get back to the default state. We will only force customers to customize a report if they "customize" the report in the "Customize Report" dialog. The thinking is that our default reports become less useful if we force customers to always create a custom report with every little change. For example, if you simply want to make a column wider or add a memo column, why should you be forced to create a custom report. The presented data is still the same, the presentation of that data has just changed. We will provide a way to quickly get back to the default state. What do people think?jacobs said:@Quicken Marcus Another release with meaningful updates for Quicken Mac users -- thanks to you and the team for some of these long-in-development features.
Two small small problems I've noticed with the new Report Collapse/Expand feature: (1) Making changes in the expand/collapse/disclosure settings alone does not enable me to Save the report. Save is grayed out until I click Customize and then OK. (It isn't necessary to actually change anything in the Customize pane; just opening it and clicking OK somehow triggers the app to recognize a change has been made.) If I open a report and make changes to collapse all, expand all, or set individual disclosure triangles the way I want, I can't Save the report because Save remains gray; changing those settings should enable the Save button.
(2) Closing a report after changing the disclosure settings, the report just closes without the ability to save it -- but the report is actually, unexpectedly, saved with the changes. This is true of both custom reports and the base reports, which I didn't think were ever supposed to change from their base settings. (Open a base report, such as Transactions by Category. Click Collapse All. Close the report. Open the same report. Note that it is fully collapsed, even though the Edited column doesn't show it was ever edited.)
The way Quicken Windows and Quicken Mac, in the not too distant future, will handle complex loan payments is there will be a special "loan" payment option. This way you can budget the full payment but continue to have a split where the principal is a transfer to the loan account and interest and other costs are tracked as category expenses. We realize this is one of the top reasons customers have expressed they wanted the ability to budget transfers but it's actually more complicated because of the split. This is a top feature priority.aaron said:Nice update. Happy to finally be able to budget transfers. Is there any intention to eventually have transfers show up under categories? I think most people hope to be able to budget their mortgage payment and have the principal payment show up under the mortgage category instead of TO Mortgage Company.
I totally agree with this philosophy as long as one can always choose to initiate a custom report save manually if they desire to keep some changes in the column widths, etc.Quicken Marcus said:We will only force customers to customize a report if they "customize" the report in the "Customize Report" dialog. The thinking is that our default reports become less useful if we force customers to always create a custom report with every little change. For example, if you simply want to make a column wider or add a memo column, why should you be forced to create a custom report. The presented data is still the same, the presentation of that data has just changed. We will provide a way to quickly get back to the default state. What do people think?
I think this could be okay, but it has to be consistent, and a few things would help that…Quicken Marcus said:
We've had a number of discussions about what constitutes a change that requires creating a custom report and what changes will automatically be captured by the default report. We've landed but haven't implemented the idea that the presentation or look of a report should NOT be a change that requires creating a custom report as long as we give customers a quick and easy way to get back to the default state. We will only force customers to customize a report if they "customize" the report in the "Customize Report" dialog... What do people think?
jacobs said:...Quicken Marcus said:
We've had a number of discussions about what constitutes a change that requires creating a custom report and what changes will automatically be captured by the default report. We've landed but haven't implemented the idea that the presentation or look of a report should NOT be a change that requires creating a custom report as long as we give customers a quick and easy way to get back to the default state. We will only force customers to customize a report if they "customize" the report in the "Customize Report" dialog... What do people think?I think the best option might be to make every change trigger a Save dialog box with three options: (a) Save changes to existing report, (b) Save As a new report, or (c) Cancel without saving changes. That feels very consistent with the way Mac programs work, and eliminates different rules for what does and doesn't get saved.
For me what is confusing is the "payment status" under "Bills". This shows the most recent (already completed) payment for the payee, but to me that is confusing as "Bills" is supposedly showing the next payment for a payee. If you right click, you can uncheck this column (which I did), but I still think the title "Payment Status" is confusing. Perhaps "Last Payment to Payee" would be clearer?Quicken Marcus said:Zoolook, I think something might be set up incorrectly in your scheduled transactions, or possibly we have a bug because I've never seen what you're describing. Bills show you scheduled transactions that have yet to be marked as paid. Activity will only show you scheduled transactions that have already been paid. A single instance of a scheduled transaction will only show up in one place and not both. Could you accidentally have multiple scheduled transactions for the same payee? If you look under Projected Balance you will see all your scheduled transactions in a single place. Do you have multiple scheduled transactions for the same payee?Zoolook said:The Bills / Payees / Activity tabs are a mess. If you have something as a Bill and is in the scheduled payees list, it will post to your register twice. Not only that, but the actions on each screen are different.
My Amex bill (which I scheduled via Quick Pay) shows in my register twice. Under bills it says "Due in 14 days" and "Scheduled" and the option to "Mark as Paid" on the far right box (should I do this, is it paid, or should I wait until it's actually paid?) Whereas under Payees where it also shows as Scheduled, the available action is "Pay with Bank Bill Pay" - it doesn't seem to know I've already scheduled the payment.
A check I pay to the building maintenance on a scheduled basis shows as "Delivered" in the activity tab, but "due in 7 days" in the bills tab and in the payees tab it just says "paid". Perhaps the columns could have "last paid" and "next due date" as dates, so it's clear when a status refers to the last payment or the next due payment.
I think you should unify the bills and payees sections so you don't accidentally pay the same bill twice.
Hi Rich,Rich August said:@Quicken_Marcus I appreciate all of the new features. I just wanted to express a comment/concern relating to the new system requirements which are updated from time to time. I'm currently running MacOS 10.13 High Sierra on an older Mac Pro tower, still holding out hope for an affordable new Mac tower from Apple someday. Unlike previous MacOS versions, High Sierra is a hard stop for many older Macs like mine. Those of us with less recent machines cannot upgrade to Mohave or newer OS versions. I'm hoping that you will take this into account in planning for future versions, and that once you take the next step and High Sierra becomes the minimum baseline for Quicken Mac you will be able to stay at that minimum requirement for a while. I'm sure that there are large numbers of loyal Quicken Mac users like me that won't be able to upgrade past MacOS 10.13. Many thanks.