Can't get selected transfers in my report

joncreative

I am new from Quicken 2007 and am trying to get report parity with what I had on that old platform. Today, I am trying to generate a Payroll report that shows selected categories and transfers as rows. I can get gross wages displayed because they are "categories" but amounts withheld for income taxes, Social Security, and Medicare are transfers to liability accounts rather than categories. I see that under "Advanced" in "Edit Report" I can choose to include transfers, but there is no way to select which transfers I want. In the ancient version of Quicken, you could treat accounts as categories using a bracket syntax. I don't see anything similar with this new version. Is there a way around this limitation?

jacobs

If you want to include selected transfers in a report, the trick is to include the account on one side of the transfer but not the other, and then tell the report to include transfers. If you include all the accounts in your report, the transfer from checking to the liability accounts is offset by the liability accounts including the transfers from checking. If you do the payroll report on just your checking account, with "Include only transfers with accounts outside of report" selected, then you'll see those transfers in your report.

Also, you can use the Category field for Transfers, like you did in Quicken 2007. The syntax in the register Category field is slightly different, though: instead of just "[Transfer Account Name]", it's now "Transfer:[Transfer Account Name]". (You don't need this for your report; I'm just explaining how it's done.)

joncreative

OK, you have helped me out. Thank you.

I have my checking account as the sole selected account and gross wages as the only category. As you suggested, I have "Include only transfers with accounts outside of report" turned on. The report DOES include the withholding amounts (transfers), but it also includes a ton of other irrelevant transfers.

So I limited the report to certain Payees who are employees. That got me the report I was wanting. I will have to remember to manually add/subtract employees whenever I run the report.

The "Transfer:[Transfer Account Name]" syntax doesn't work for reports, does it? I have to choose categories from a pick list.

jacobs

Yes, you're correct, you can't choose Transfers from a Categories pick list for a report. That's because they are Accounts, not Categories; the "Transfer:[Transfer Account Name]" syntax is an alternative in a register if you don't want have the Transfer column visible, but it's providing shorthand for specifying an Account name, not a Category -- so you can't pick it from a Category list. 

You might also explore whether it's more or less work to create a tag (e.g. "Payroll") to apply Payees, so you could pick all transactions by one Tag instead of needing to select each Payee by name. 

joncreative

Thanks for the suggestion regarding using a tag.

I wish they hadn't kept categories in the new version. Since they did, I wonder why they don't allow the use of accounts along with categories when configuring reports.

jacobs

I'm not sure what you mean about wishing they hadn't kept categories in the new version. Categories is pretty much the heart of Quicken -- categorizing every transaction is what allow people to track and manage their finances. 

Categories and accounts are two different dimensions of data. You might want to see transactions from one account or several, organized by category. Or you might want to see transactions from certain or all accounts, organized by account. you might want accounts separated or combined. The reporting structure allows you to do all of this. But categories are for income and expenses, and moving money from one account to another is neither income nor expense. That's why in earlier versions of modern Quicken Mac, you couldn't even see transfers in category-driven reports, or the budget, which is category-driven. But last year, they added capabilities to both reports and budgets to allow you to control which accounts are used in a report or budget, and to therefore surface these cash-flow transactions even though they aren't technically income or expenses.