Categories for new Quicken Mac

kevs

Super weird annoying the new categories. 1/2 I don't used, but cannot delete? Say required?

And does not sort income/ expense, all intermingled? Lost. Lot of clutter. Lot of weird green check marks in circles

Also no way to get categories on toolbar?

I guess some of those forced ones are used as Qucken populates them on their of with card statement downloads?

jacobs

You can access your category list in its own window via the menu command Window > Categories, and you can see/choose them in any transaction in a drop-down menu when you're in the Category field.

There is no Toolbar for accessing categories. There has never been one in the 6+ year history of the modern Quicken Mac. (In the old Quicken 2007, there was a toolbar button for Categories -- which was the same as the menu command for Lists > Categories & Transfers; in the modern Quicken Mac, you get the same thing via Window > Categories.)

jacobs

@kevs  There is a Reports link on the toolbar; it takes you to a screen where you can select from among many different types of reports. Ones you have used recently show up in Recently Used, and ones you have modified from the Quicken default show under My Reports. You can modify the default Transaction Report to something specific you want and save it under its own name, so you can open that report in one click in the future. 

jacobs

There are about 35 required categories or subcategories, but 30 of those are one category: Investments. Those are required because they map investment transactions to the tax report. The other few are special-purpose categories, like  Adjustment and Transfer, which also have operational functions in Quicken. Everything else can be deleted if you don't want to use them; there really aren't many you can't delete.

Be aware that if you want Quicken to auto-categorize your transaction downloads, Quicken's categorization server (actually run by Intuit) maps to the existing Quicken categories, so you may need to manually categorize more of your transactions -- or create enough QuickFill transactions that most of your transactions are categorize the way you want.

I'm not sure why you'd want categories on a toolbar. When you are entering or editing a transaction, you can type a few letters in the Category column and select the one you want, or click and select from the pop-up menu of all categories.

kevs

Thanks Jacobs. I just remember sometime wanting to bring categories up and now cannot put on toolbar or can you? Now go through menus.

jacobs

You can access your category list in its own window via the menu command Window > Categories, and you can see/choose them in any transaction in a drop-down menu when you're in the Category field.

There is no Toolbar for accessing categories. There has never been one in the 6+ year history of the modern Quicken Mac. (In the old Quicken 2007, there was a toolbar button for Categories -- which was the same as the menu command for Lists > Categories & Transfers; in the modern Quicken Mac, you get the same thing via Window > Categories.)

kevs

Yeah I was on 2007 for long time , that was great feature.

jacobs

If you want to see the Categories list frequently, I have two suggestions:

1. Open the Categories window, drag it to the right of your main window, and just leave it open. It doesn't have to be fully visible -- just enough that you can see a piece of it to click on and bring it to the front. One-click on the window is the same as one-click on a toolbar in Quicken 2007.
2. Use the command key shortcut to open the Categories Window: Command-Shift-C. It might take a little while to remember it, but the shortcut is visible on the Windows menu. One you get this command locked into your brain, you once again have one-click access to the Categories window.

kevs

Jacobs, thanks will note. Also reports used have a nice button in tool bar. On click. Now it a more non intuitive menu item called transaction report which requires a few more clicks to get going?

That's almost the extent of what I do in quicken!

jacobs

@kevs  There is a Reports link on the toolbar; it takes you to a screen where you can select from among many different types of reports. Ones you have used recently show up in Recently Used, and ones you have modified from the Quicken default show under My Reports. You can modify the default Transaction Report to something specific you want and save it under its own name, so you can open that report in one click in the future. 

kevs

Thanks again Jacob, yes see it there report. Non intuitive at first but now have it done, so all good..