Reports not Picking up all transactions

whitepd47

I have a travel category with 2-sub categories: Vacation & Tournaments. The were ~$800 vacation expenses during May. All summary reports for May only show ~$42 for vacation (this is one of the many May transactions. I've tried everything to try to fix this without success. Any ideas appreciated.

jacobs

@Peter  Okay, so now we need to gig a little deeper. I'm pretty sure there's a simple answer here which just hasn't been uncovered yet...

You've probably done some or all of these things already, but I'll just suggest a few quick checks:

• If you don't have your categories set to Display Long Names, try this at least temporarily in your Preferences > Register settings. Sometimes this will make it easier to spot errors 
• Make sure that the subcategories you're looking for exist in only one place in your list of categories. (It might seem obvious, but many times, people inadvertently have the same category or sub-category name in two places, such as sub-categories of two different main categories.) 
• In the report set-up's Categories tab, have you checked the main category, the sub-categories, or both?

Is this a problem with just the Summary report, or also with the Transaction (detail) report? If the former, when you double-click on the Vacations amount in the Summary report, it opens a window with the underlying transactions. Which one(s) are shown and which ones are missing? Now go to the register and look at both one of the included transactions and one of the omitted transactions to see if you can spot any difference.

If it's possible for you to capture and share screenshots of non-sensitive data, it would be helpful. Can you show one or more of the May transactions with its categories, and the report which omits this data?

whitepd47

Thank you you Rick. I followed your advice- same problem: doesn't bring up all transactions- only the ~$42.

jacobs

@Peter  Okay, so now we need to gig a little deeper. I'm pretty sure there's a simple answer here which just hasn't been uncovered yet...

You've probably done some or all of these things already, but I'll just suggest a few quick checks:

• If you don't have your categories set to Display Long Names, try this at least temporarily in your Preferences > Register settings. Sometimes this will make it easier to spot errors 
• Make sure that the subcategories you're looking for exist in only one place in your list of categories. (It might seem obvious, but many times, people inadvertently have the same category or sub-category name in two places, such as sub-categories of two different main categories.) 
• In the report set-up's Categories tab, have you checked the main category, the sub-categories, or both?

Is this a problem with just the Summary report, or also with the Transaction (detail) report? If the former, when you double-click on the Vacations amount in the Summary report, it opens a window with the underlying transactions. Which one(s) are shown and which ones are missing? Now go to the register and look at both one of the included transactions and one of the omitted transactions to see if you can spot any difference.

If it's possible for you to capture and share screenshots of non-sensitive data, it would be helpful. Can you show one or more of the May transactions with its categories, and the report which omits this data?

whitepd47

Color me stupid... I was thinking that Tags (HH21) would somehow adjust the different transaction reports to show Travel:Vacation. Once I changed a HH21 categories to Travel:Vacation instead of something like 'Dining' everything worked great. Thank you for the response and please hit me with the 'stupid hammer'!

jacobs

Glad you figured it out!

Tags and Categories are independent, which can make them powerful to use together for reporting. First, a transaction can have only one category, but it can have multiple different tags, which can be useful in some applications. And tags let you create a second dimension of looking at your data.

So if you wanted all your dining on these trips to be in the Dining category, and your gas or airfare in the Auto or Vacation category, but also wanted to be able to track which of those expenses were for tournaments, you could add the HH21 tags to the appropriate transactions. Then you could generate reports by your regular categories, by the HH21 tag, or both in combination (e.g. Dining transactions with the HH21 tag).