Change the order of individual register entries?

Perci Verance

I found this Accepted Answer dated Feb 20 to the forum submission:
check registry entry order?

"If you click and hold a transaction, you can rearrange the order of the transactions by dragging and dropping that transaction to the order you prefer."

But it doesn't work when I try it. Am I missing something? Do you have to click and hold a particular spot in the transaction register entry?
I haven't found a menu command or up/down arrows to accomplish this reorder, either.

I have today added transactions related to - and on the same date as - a previously entered transaction. I do not want to split the original, but want them to appear as separate entries in the register.
They are automatically placed below other transactions entered on the original date.
I want them grouped together in the register.

Thank you

Chris_QPW

You are looking at an answer for Quicken Mac.  Quicken Mac works that way, Quicken Windows doesn't.
There are various sorting options in Quicken Windows like sorting by Order Entered, but there isn't any way to change the order of individual transactions.

Also in most of the sorting options deposits are put before withdraws because most financial institutions do that and people want it so that they don't get negative balances.

Personally I think it is a very hard problem.  Say a user moves a transaction around and then changes the sorting order which basically tells Quicken to put them in a different order.  Which "command" from the user does it "obey"?   And if it overrides the first "command" where the user has moved the transaction to the new sorting, what happens if the user changes the sorting back to what it was set to before?

oldngrmpy1

This brings up another question. This is the first time I've noticed the Income deposits all in front of the outgoing transactions. It all makes sense except that even though my CU groups income in front of outgoing for a given date, there's a fly in the ointment, because my CU does in fact follow that rule except that it breaks that rule with regards to my incoming DIV for that account, which is still listed as the last transaction on my monthly statement. This has caused me problems because as noted in a post, I put in the EOM statement amount in the last transaction for the month in the notes column on the DIV transaction, which causes that memo to change lines in the order in the register. The only way I can make it work is if I sort by order entered, but then it's not in order when I compare to statement. I would have to suspect that using sort by order entered useless for anything. I have to suspect  most FI's follow that rule, and if so why doesn't Quicken do the same and break that rule in the default sort order, and put the DIV income in the last transaction for the month. They should be able to write the code using DIV, or Dividend to make it last transaction for the month, making the register mirror the FI statement for the month all the way through to the last entry. With what I do I often wondered why my statement amount (my MF Idea... search community for MF to read mor)  would change lines in the register, now I know why I have to change it!

UKR

You said: "I would have to suspect that using sort by order entered useless for anything"

No, not really. I have used this setting while entering a bunch of old transactions, with dates much older than today.
When recording such transactions while the register is sorted by Date, these new transactions immediately disappear from screen because they're moved to their correct position by date, a few screens up from today.
When recording such transactions while the register is sorted by Order entered, the new transactions remain together at the bottom of the register, making it easy to see which ones I was just working on.
Of course, once you're done entering old transactions, one should re-order the register by Date so it all makes sense, Running Balance included.

Chris_QPW

Order Entered has many useful purposes, the fact that it might not work as one user might like in a given situation is a testament to how hard this problem is.  Another indication is just how many different sorting options there are.  Allowing the user to move transactions around on a given date is yet another.  But it has an extra twists to it.  First off it isn't automatic.  That means that if say every week you download the same transactions and Quicken puts them in your register some way that you don't like, then every week you are going to have to rearrange them.  Not exactly what most people would like.  Another problem is how does this even fit into the other sorting options, do you have one called "User's order"?  So that if they sort by a different order they can come back to this one if they like?  And what if the user decides that now that they think of it they might want some or all of the transactions in "User order" to be sorted "permanently" using some other sorting?  Now you might have to have functions to push that sorting to the User order, maybe for the whole register or just the selected transactions.

Order Entered has been used for finding duplicate transactions.  Order Entered in a manual account is exactly what it sounds like, all transactions will be in the order that the user entered them.  Note in a maul entry account Quicken doesn't push Deposits in front of Withdraws even in the normal date sorting.  There is also By Date/Order enter, which is most likely the one people using manual entry would use since if you enter a transaction for an older date most of the time you would want it sorted back at that date not with the present day transactions (except maybe for a temporary use case like @UKR points out).

Perci Verance

I want to thank those who have responded here.
As pointed out, the feature I sought doesn't currently exist in Quicken's Windows environment.

Since it does for Mac, the developers have likely looked into it for Windows. I'm sure the task is technically complex and, based on what I've read here, the decision whether to pursue it could be complicated, too.

Despite my disappointment, I've learned a lot from these comments.

By the way, something I read here didn't square with my recollection of how my typical manual transactions are automatically sorted by Date, so I ran a test of several fake transactions on the same day (today).
Sorting by Date, the only Deposits that don't get pushed in front of Withdrawals are those following an EFT. At least in my case.
Date/Order entry would probably avoid this, and I might prefer trying that for a while.

Thanks again.

Perci Verance

I wasn't paying close enough attention when I entered the EFT transaction mentioned above.
It was a fake credit to the account (because of some historic transaction), and I assumed it was a debit.
Testing again as a debit EFT followed by a Deposit, the Deposit was pushed in front of it also.

No big deal, in any case.
I didn't see how to edit my prior comment, thus this new one.

Chris_QPW

Perci Verance said:

I didn't see how to edit my prior comment, thus this new one.

You should be able to edit your comment for 24 hours.  Select the ... in the upper right of the comment.