How do you change the Category Groups displayed in a report

Nautique Guy

I have several summary reports grouped by Category Groups. I moved some categories to a new group I created. The new Category Group showed up in one report but not the other.
I have every Account, every Category and every Payee selected in the customize dialog but find no way to select the Category Groups to use in the report.

I found some documentation that says to Click the Category Groups tab in the customize dialog but there is no Category Groups tab.

I also found some documentation that says
Step 4 Click Display tab
Step 5 In the organization list, select category group.
but the organization list only has Income/Expense and Cash Flow Basis in it. No Category Groups.

I also found this user with the same problem but Answer given doesn't have anything to do with question.
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7873410/how-to-include-category-groups-in-reports-instructions

The report is a simple two column summary showing the Category and $Total for the date ranges selected in the toolbar. The Categories are grouped by Category Group.

Nautique Guy

It seems the people answering this question don't understand the report being shown. It has nothing to do with Planning, Budgeting or Comparisons. It's a simple summary, see attached image.

I'm not sure how I initially created the report since it was over 15 years ago. I went through every report in the menu and in the Report Center and none of them create a report like the one I have. The closest one is the Banking Summary with it customized to Hide All Subcategories. The difference between it and mine however is that Organization drop-down on the Customize->Display tab is blank whereas in the Banking Summary it can only be set to Income and Expense or Cash Flow Basis.

It's this setting that apparently determines how the items in the report are grouped as the documentation mentioned above indicates. It appears they either no long support allowing the Organization to be blank thereby grouping the items by Category Groups or its a bug that never got reported.

Anyway, I have several different copies of this report with different accounts, categories and columns selected in the Customize dialog. The problem was that when I added some new Category Groups the new groups only showed up in some of my reports and not all. I was therefore looking for a way turn on the newly added groups in the reports where they didn't show up.

In the end I decided that the new groups should have shown up in all my reports and it was a bug that they didn't. I got around this by recreating my reports with the categories groups missing. I started with the report that showed all the groups and used the Save Copy command to make a new report. I then customized it to match the one with the missing groups, saved it and deleted the corrupted one.

This was all very frustrating. I'm not sure why they would no longer allow creating the most useful report that they had. Hopefully it's a bug in the Organization drop-down where someone didn't realize being empty is a valid answer and it'll get fixed. In the mean time I made a master copy of the report so when I need to create another one I can start by making a copy of it.

YingDave

The section of the Help file from that post actually applies to Budgeting and Planning. I agree the help is not very explicit and therefore can be mis-interpreted, if you browse the help and drill down the path of "Plan Your Finance" you can find the section in that post and the answer from @Boatnmaniac. Category Groups are not not available for every report. In fact there are only 2 standard budget reports and neither of them display the category groups.

So if your main goal is $Total against a category groups then compared to your target amount (ie your budget) then suggest you go to the Planning section and play around in there to set up a budget and select which elements you want to display. I am myself still learning my way around in this section. 

In summary the budget (category group spend) report in the standard Reports only amount to 2, and neither of them let you display group as a field. You are able to see category group spending by displaying the Budget section (either Graphical or Annual) then hit Ctrl+P or File menu, Print budget.

Agree this is probably an area of improvement for Quicken, but Reports Section has been around forever and then after that Budgets and Category Groups evolved after that. The 2 are not completely integrated.

Nautique Guy

It seems the people answering this question don't understand the report being shown. It has nothing to do with Planning, Budgeting or Comparisons. It's a simple summary, see attached image.

I'm not sure how I initially created the report since it was over 15 years ago. I went through every report in the menu and in the Report Center and none of them create a report like the one I have. The closest one is the Banking Summary with it customized to Hide All Subcategories. The difference between it and mine however is that Organization drop-down on the Customize->Display tab is blank whereas in the Banking Summary it can only be set to Income and Expense or Cash Flow Basis.

It's this setting that apparently determines how the items in the report are grouped as the documentation mentioned above indicates. It appears they either no long support allowing the Organization to be blank thereby grouping the items by Category Groups or its a bug that never got reported.

Anyway, I have several different copies of this report with different accounts, categories and columns selected in the Customize dialog. The problem was that when I added some new Category Groups the new groups only showed up in some of my reports and not all. I was therefore looking for a way turn on the newly added groups in the reports where they didn't show up.

In the end I decided that the new groups should have shown up in all my reports and it was a bug that they didn't. I got around this by recreating my reports with the categories groups missing. I started with the report that showed all the groups and used the Save Copy command to make a new report. I then customized it to match the one with the missing groups, saved it and deleted the corrupted one.

This was all very frustrating. I'm not sure why they would no longer allow creating the most useful report that they had. Hopefully it's a bug in the Organization drop-down where someone didn't realize being empty is a valid answer and it'll get fixed. In the mean time I made a master copy of the report so when I need to create another one I can start by making a copy of it.

q_lurker

The difference between it and mine however is that Organization drop-down on the Customize->Display tab is blank whereas in the Banking Summary it can only be set to Income and Expense or Cash Flow Basis.

My Banking Summary Report customization includes Category Groups for the organization pull-down.



QW Premier Subscription R30.21

Maybe try setting up a new file for testing -- to see if it is a file issue or a program installation issue?

Maybe a File Validation (preferably on a Quicken copy of the file)?

Maybe something with screen resolution settings?