Side Bar Totals for Hidden Accounts (Q Mac)

tcroots78

Please allow an option to keep the totals from hidden accounts in the sidebar. Especially for retirement rollovers this is important in the "Portfolio" view b/c I am losing the history from just a few months ago, let alone the 10 Year view.

These do show in my Net Worth and reports. It is just an issue with the side view.

RickO

I don't understand. Are you talking about showing account balances for account in the Hidden Accounts group in the sidebar? Mine show in the current version of QMac.

Or are you talking about some aspect of each account's Portfolio view?

tcroots78

Talked to support today and they said this is not possible and suggested I put out an idea here.

if I have an old account (employee changed administrators in this case) that I want to hide (in the sidebar) that it then loses the the history in the “Investment” section or Investment -> portfolio view.

It moves it the hidden accounts. Which is great bc I don’t have all these old accounts clogging up the sidebar. But now two months ago my investment history goes to $0, when I actually have 10+ years history.

jacobs

Ah, that's a clearer explanation than your original post and headline above. The issue is not the sidebar; you want the old account hidden in the sidebar. The problem is that hidden accounts disappear out of investment portfolio history. I agree that this is a problem.

What happens doesn't even match Quicken's description of what "Hide in Lists" is supposed to do:



According to Quicken, an account marked for Hide in Lists should still be visible in overview, budgets, account summary, reports and graphs. So why does an account marked Hide in Lists disappear from investment Portfolio view graphs, investment Portfolio view tables, and investment transaction registers? It's not hidden from lists; it's completely hidden. Perhaps the engineers would say this is "working as designed", but it seems like a bug to me. At the least, it doesn't seem consistent with Quicken's own description of what "Hide in Lists" should do.

An investment account with a current value, marked to "Hide in Lists," remains in Accounts Summary, remains in Net Worth, yet is invisible in any Investing view. This is problematic. Even if the account has a current value of zero, having it disappear from investing history is problematic. 

RickO

Not sure I agree. Here's why: When you are looking at a portfolio within the Investing group, you are looking at only accounts within that sidebar group. You can use the filter dropdown to select a subset of accounts within that group. But the hidden accounts are not within the Investing group, so including them in the portfolio view there would not make sense to me. As noted, the hidden accounts are properly included in the Net Worth reports.

Perhaps the top level Hidden Accounts group should have a Portfolio tab to allow this information to be displayed. Or if that doesn't make sense because there's a mix of banking and investment accounts within, then the Hidden Accounts group needs to have 2nd level subgroups of Investing, Banking and Property/Debt to mirror the top level non-hidden groups.

jacobs

RickO said:

Here's why: When you are looking at a portfolio within the Investing group, you are looking at only accounts within that sidebar group. You can use the filter dropdown to select a subset of accounts within that group. But the hidden accounts are not within the Investing group, so including them in the portfolio view there would not make sense to me. 

Yes, that's technically accurate -- but I ask whether this interpretation is useful for and expected by users. My answer would be that it's not useful and not expected. Following your reasoning, anyone who want to see the history of their investments over time could never hide any investment account. I think most long-time Quicken users have switched some of their brokerages or investment accounts over time, so the current approach requires a choice of two undesirable options: (1) don't hide any accounts, and deal with all the zero balance accounts in your sidebar forever, or (2) hide old accounts, but lose the ability to see how your investments have performed over time. 

RickO said:

Perhaps the top level Hidden Accounts group should have a Portfolio tab to allow this information to be displayed. Or if that doesn't make sense because there's a mix of banking and investment accounts within, then the Hidden Accounts group needs to have 2nd level subgroups of Investing, Banking and Property/Debt to mirror the top level non-hidden groups.

Yes, that approach could work, although it makes the sidebar somewhat clunkier. But I'm not sure it solves your original objection: hidden investment accounts would still not be part of the Investments group in the sidebar, they'd be part of a separate Hidden > Investments group -- and there's no way to show two different subgroups in the sidebar simultaneously.

-----

I go back to the definition of what "Hide in Lists" aims and claims to do. It hides accounts from lists, like the sidebar and dropdown account menus. That should be all it hides. It should not make actual transactions disappear from a register as it does currently; it should not wipe history away from portfolio graphs as it does currently. (This goes beyond investment accounts; for example, transactions from hidden credit card accounts disappear from a register of Credit Card transactions.)

As always, there's a compromise available with the addition of a new Preference setting: show/hide transactions from hidden accounts in group registers/portfolios.

Otherwise, I think the name "Hide in Lists" needs to be changed to "Hide in Display", and the chart of what gets hidden needs to be updated to reflect that "Hide from Display" means all transactions from such accounts will be hidden from registers (yet remain visible in reports, which controlled separately). Or, there should be separate Hide In Lists and Hide in Display settings instead of just one.

One way or the other, the current implementation of "Hide in Lists" needs to be changed.

RickO

Another possible solution would be to have an additional 2nd level group under Investing call Hidden Investment Accounts in addition to Brokerage and Retirement (which could be left collapsed, and not shown at all if chosen in the Account Display setting). Hidden investment account would go there and all other hidden accounts in the Hidden Accounts group at the bottom. That would solve it I think.