Category Grouping

willit618

I am migrating from the Windows subscription version to the Mac subscription version. I am trying to find the "category grouping" functionality but have been unsuccessful. Basically, I want to create my reports with categories clumped together in customizable groups. For instance in my Windows version, I have a monthly spending report with grouping headings of "Education", "Misc Expenses", "Housing", "Insurance", "Loans", "Retirement", and "Income". Each grouping heading has multiple defined categories linked to it so that those categories are shown under the appropriate top level "category grouping" designation in my reports. Does this functionality exist in the Mac subscription version and if not, is it on the roadmap? Unfortunately, this severely limits the Mac version's reporting utility for me.

jacobs

There is no feature in Quicken Mac to allow you to build a custom report like this.

I can think of two approaches to this. First, you could do some reorganizing of your Categories to create the main headings you want as top-level categories, and move the appropriate categories under them as sub-categories. Note that you can't do this with Quicken's pre-defined required categories, so you couldn't make "Investing" a sub-category of "Income".

the other alternative is to create a category report, export it to a csv file, open it in a spreadsheet, and re-arrange and total the categories as you desire. This could get your desired result, but you have to do the work to set it up each time.

As for whether this feature is on a development roadmap, no one here can answer that; we're fellow Quicken users and Quicken moderators, and none of us have insight into the ranking of the hundreds of feature requests users have asked for.

Interestingly, I don't recall a request for this feature previously; as a lifelong Mac user, it's not a Quicken Windows feature I remember hearing about. That doesn't means it's not useful, but it's not something other converts from Windows have been lobbying for.

If you'd like to create a feature request for this in Quicken Mac, create a new post in the Product Ideas - Quicken for Mac > Reports (Mac) category of this site. When you do that, other users can add their votes if they'd like to see the feature. Once an idea amasses some number of votes or a lot of discussion, the moderators can forward it to the product development teams for evaluation.

Chris_QPW

It sounds like Quicken Mac doesn't have the "Category Group" concept that Quicken Windows has.  This isn't about the hierarchical category order (which both versions have).

A category group is basically an extension of the idea of EXPENSE and INCOME.
Standard layout of the budget report:


In category group layout:



Categories can be assigned to different Category Groups, which in turn are separated out in a few places like in the budget view and budget report.

jacobs

I get it, and it sounds useful. It sounds like just a higher level of categorization. If I could take all my current categories and assign them to a high-level "grouping" master category. (Unless it allows the same category to be in multiple category groups (as appears to be the case with "Auto" in the screenshot above.)

In any case, this doesn't exist in Quicken Mac. I was just suggesting Categories and sub-categories (and sub-sub-categories, etc) as a possible way to create something similar if this was really important to the user.

jacobs

P.S. When you create a new Idea post, remember to vote for your own Idea.  (In the blue box under the post, click the little gray arrow; the count will go up and the arrow will change to solid black.)

Chris_QPW

jacobs said:

I get it, and it sounds useful. It sounds like just a higher level of categorization. 

I guess that depends on how you think about "categorization", but it is more like the ability to group things differently in views/reports.

Any given category can only be in one category group.  And there are already default category groups.  "Personal Expense" starts out as the same as "Expenses".  And of course there is "Personal Income" and "Income".  And given that there are business functions in Quicken Windows there are also built in "Business Expenses" and "Business Expenses".  And "Rental Property" ones too.  I wouldn't be surprise that the main reason these were created in the first place was to support the business functions to separate categories Personal vs Business.  Note they use also tags for individual businesses.

And then the user can add their own.