Category not showing up in report

JayDC

I recently added a subcategory under "Gifts". There are several transactions from a checking account using that subcategory, however, when I open a Cash Flow Report, the subcategory doesn't show up at all. These are subcategories for gifts to grandkids and others, so there are a dozen or so such subcategories. This is the only one that doesn't show up. Anything I can try to get this to work?

jacobs

Out of curiosity, what happens if you try a Category Summary Year To Date report or Transactions By Category report instead?

JayDC

There are 17 subcategories under Gifts. If I select Current Year Income Statement under My Reports" modified to include thru Dec 31, 14 of the 17 subcategories show up. Two if them had no transactions, so that is understandable, but the other one did not show up, even though there were transactions. Ironically, if I select Income Statement - 2 years, only 7 of them show up, even though 16 were active. If I go under Payees, I find that there are 6 transactions under this category, two during 2020. No explanation that I can find yet. If I select Category Summary Year to Date, the Subcategory is there with the correct amount. It is also under under Category By Account Report. It is also under Cash Flow under "Quicken Reports". I just tried opening the Cash Flow under "Quicken Reports" and modified it to go through 31 Dec and then saved it under "My Reports" as Cash Flow - 2020 and it showed up. Perhaps reports under "My Reports" have been contaminated or don't update with new software updates.

jacobs

I just want to confirm: you’re using Quicken Mac, right? (There isn’t a report named Income Statement in Quicken Mac, unless it’s one you previously created.)

If your existing reports were created from the old Category Summary report, that would likely be all the explanation needed: that report is known to have problems that cause some reports to omit data. That’s why I asked you to run a stock Quicken report like Category Summary Year to Date or Transactions By Category. Anything except the ones on the Reports page under “Other” use the new reports engine, and I suspect will report your missing subcategories. The ones under “Other” are the ones using the old reports engine, and are slated to be removed from the program in the future.

jacobs

@JayDC  You can easily tell if your saved reports use the "old" reports engine or the "new" reports engine. An old Category Summary report looks like this at the top:

 

Telltale signs:

• It shows the criteria under the menu bar
• It has the "Update View to show me" and "Show Memo/Notes" controls on the right side above the columns
• There are no column headings
• The first major heading is "Money In"

The new reports, like this Category Summary Year To Date report and Category Transaction report, have some easily visible differences:





Telltale signs:

• There is a View menu in the menu bar, for determining which columns and rows are visible
• It has a row of settings under the menu bar which affect the report type (summary or transaction), and what data appears in the rows and columns, and whether there are time intervals (yearly, monthly, quarterly) 
• There are column headings
• The first major heading is "Income"

I hope that helps make the "old" and "new" reports clearer at a glance.

JayDC

I think I may have this sorted out. I deleted all of My Reports and created new ones from the Quicken standard reports. Yes, I am using Mac. Thanks for your guidance!! Jay

jacobs

@JayDC  Great! Unfortunately, you were likely the victim of whatever bugs there are in that old Category Summary report which the developers have neither fixed (because it's essentially been superseded by the new reports) nor removed (because they would have messed up users like you who had existing reports).

I'm guessing they're either waiting until they can covert all the old reports to the new ones automatically, or they're waiting until they add a few more features (particularly: control over subtotaling) before they axe the old reports. Meanwhile, there's no indication to users like you to warn you away from using the old reports or encourage you to do what you did and recreate them using the new reports engine. Fortunately, you were able to spot that you were missing some data and search for a solution, but I find this situation particularly unfortunate for users who may be using the old report and not know some data is missing.

In any case, now that you've switched to the new reports I thin you'll find things work as expected, and you'll find you can do more tweaking of the reports (content-wise and formatting-wise) than you could with the old ones.