Quicken for Mac v6.3 Released
Quicken Marcus
Quicken Mac Subscription Employee ✭✭✭✭
I'm excited to announce the release of v6.3. This is an exciting release with lots of great features many of which customers have been asking us to add for a long time.
Investing Dashboard and Simple Investing
We're adding a new investing dashboard that will show you a high-level view of your holdings, top movers, security, and asset class allocation pie charts. We look at this as a quick way to get the pulse of your investments without having to dive into the nitty-gritty.
We also allow you to track your investments using simple or detailed tracking. Many customers find investments confusing and want to avoid having to deal with cost basis and individual transactions. This is why we created the Simple Investment Tracking mode. Customers will primarily use the dashboard to track their investments but the portfolio view is there if they want it. In this mode, you will not have to deal with the transaction view. If you want to control every detail of your investment portfolio including tracking capital gains for tax purposes, then you should use the Detailed Investment Tracking mode.
Budget Detailed Mortgage Payments
This has been a long-time requested feature and it's taken far too long to add it. To get to this point we first had to get account filtering to work in budgets. Next, we got transfers working, and now we have the detailed loan payment. The way this works is in the category picker, under the Loan (Detailed Payments) section you will now see your mortgage payments so you can add them to the budget.
Account Issue Indicator on the Sidebar
We have also added a new feature where transaction download issues are surfaced and displayed on the account sidebar. Instead of a Blue dot which means everything went well, you will now see an orange dot if there are problems. This will make it easier to spot issues without having to look at the Account Status window.
Also, when you click on that account, you'll see a banner at the top of the screen that will allow you to start the process of trying to fix the issue.
In addition, we've provided an option to turn off the account status window so you can simply rely on the sidebar dots to be notified of an account issue.
Auto-Reconcile
As you’ve seen over the past couple of releases, we’ve been updating the reconcile feature in Quicken. First, we added Reconciliation History. Then we updated the old Reconcile screen to match the new look. Finally, we're adding the ability to auto-reconcile. This is a huge time-saving feature for those of you that use online balance reconciliation. Now, you can let Quicken automatically reconcile all the transactions in an account if the online balance matches your Quicken balance.
Dark Mode
Finally, we've created a new section in Preferences to allow you to get an early look at new upcoming features before they are completely done and officially released. The first feature we're introducing is Dark Mode. Dark Mode is a huge amount of work because every single screen and window in Quicken has to be updated. We've got most of the basic screens looking pretty good so we think the early access Dark Mode is pretty usable but you will find cosmetic issues throughout the product where a screen doesn't quite look right or something is too dark or on a white background and stands out. Anyway, instead of holding up this feature before it's completely done, we've decided to allow those that want to try it out to be able to turn it on and use it. For those of you that use Dark Mode, we hope this early look at the feature makes using Quicken a little more enjoyable for now until we can work out all the kinks and can release it officially.
Quicken Mac Dev Team
UPDATES
- 7/29 - Staged release to a small segment of customers. If you want to try it out, select Check for Updates under the Quicken menu to be able to upgrade to v6.3.
- 8/6 - Shipped 6.3.1 that includes fixes for multi-currency issues in Portfolio View and Investment Transaction view when selecting a grouped account item on the sidebar such as Investing, Brokerage, Retirement, or Education. Also fixed issues with Portfolio View settings not getting saved or restored.
- 8/23 - Shipped 6.3.2 that restores the calendar view colors back to the way they looked before and we also made the investment dashboard match the account selection of portfolio and transaction view in the Investing, Brokerage, Retirement, and Education groups. We're still in a limited release but should be able to open this up to everyone shortly.
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Comments
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Two problems I've found in Investing in 6.3 1) Collapsing the graph in brokerage and account windows doesn't stick. Graph reappears whenever new account is selected 2) Account selection drop down tab now has no effect. Unable to select different combinations of accounts Thanks for your attention0
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It's great to see mortgage payments included in the budget, Marcus! I love the auto-reconcile feature as well. I saw that there's quite a clamoring on these boards for a real find and replace feature (present in Quicken 2007!). Is that on your list?0
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Any chance the Dashboard could be date selectable? I have to enter some security prices manually the day after, so having it "today only" view doesn't work for me. Thanks for the consideration.0
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I like the new features in QM 6.3
However I did notice that in my List of Securities, I had edited the Asset Class field on some of my securities, but now after each manual price update, some of the securities revert back to the default Asset Class name. For example; the ETF FHLC I edited to be Large Cap, but after a manual update it changes back to Mixed/Multiple.
How can I keep the Asset Class edit field to stay as I named it?4 -
Dark mode looking good. I think you need to improve the row shading for scheduled events. In the light mode it is easy to see future events. In the beta dark mode there is no differentiation.0
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Lysander Spooner said:Dark mode looking good. I think you need to improve the row shading for scheduled events. In the light mode it is easy to see future events. In the beta dark mode there is no differentiation.0
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jlgg said:Two problems I've found in Investing in 6.3 1) Collapsing the graph in brokerage and account windows doesn't stick. Graph reappears whenever new account is selected 2) Account selection drop down tab now has no effect. Unable to select different combinations of accounts Thanks for your attention0
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Wow some nice features here, maybe you will make the Windows users (like me) jealous.
The Windows side is still waiting for Dark Mode, and the idea of "Account Issue Indicator on the Sidebar" seems like great idea, and Quicken Windows doesn't have that.
I do wonder about Automatic Reconcile mode though.
On the Windows side I have found that automatic transaction entry mode and automatic reconcile mode do not go well together. I would be interested in seeing how Quicken Mac addresses the following problem.
If I download transactions (with automatic reconcile off) I can now review the transactions because the new transactions are flagged.
Above I purposely removed the association between Men Oh Ramen and Dining just so it is "wrong", but it could be any kind of problem either with the category selected of even the payee name in some cases.
With the blue dot/New I know to look at them are fix any problems.
If automatic reconcile is on, it will reconcile this with no problem because the amounts are all correct, but here it is after reconcile:
Two things happen after a reconcile, one is the Clr status goes to R, but the other is that the Status/blue dot column is cleared too. If the "Men Oh Ramen" transaction is far back or even the "wrong category" it wouldn't jump out at a person that this transaction is actually recorded incorrectly.
Automatic reconcile makes a lot more sense when using Quicken Windows' other flow where you first accept each transaction into the register (fixing categories and such as you go), and then when that is all done then the automatic reconcile is triggered.
How does the Quicken Mac flow help the user ensure that their categories/transactions are actually recorded properly when in automatic reconcile mode?Signature:
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hedstrom1014 said:I like the new features in QM 6.3
However I did notice that in my List of Securities, I had edited the Asset Class field on some of my securities, but now after each manual price update, some of the securities revert back to the default Asset Class name. For example; the ETF FHLC I edited to be Large Cap, but after a manual update it changes back to Mixed/Multiple.
How can I keep the Asset Class edit field to stay as I named it?
And while I'm mentioning this issue, I'll mention a related one. How about more Asset Classes and better Asset Classes. Large Cap Value Funds should have a different Asset Class than Large Cap Growth Funds. Short Term Bond funds should have a different asset class from Government Bonds or High Risk Bonds to give a couple of examples. The current classes are not sufficient to be really useful, IMHO. And Mixed/Multiple is the least useful of them all.
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glennmacc said:ETF's and Mutual Funds all return to Mixed/ Multiple it seems.Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19934
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jacobs said:glennmacc said:ETF's and Mutual Funds all return to Mixed/ Multiple it seems.
My guess on the source of this information would be Morningstar (Quicken Inc has never stated where this information comes from as far as I know). And that is basically the guess of where the Quicken Windows gets them.
In Quicken Windows the details are held in the security details. Example.
Notice the "Download asset class information" this is what it does (user can change manually).
Why do I think it is Morningstar? Because Quicken Windows also has the "online portfolio":
https://investing.quicken.com/
And the link to the vender disclosures brings up this page.
And on top of that Quicken Windows Premier has the Morningstar X-Ray portfolio, which has similar restrictions on what asset classes it will report on.
BTW it is interesting that the Asset Class graph is on Quicken Mac's Investment Dashboard.
Because instead of that Quicken Windows has a Value over Time graph (the other graphs are the same). The Allocations are found on yet another view in Quicken Windows Premier (but not on Deluxe and below) called Allocations. The allocation graph, but not some of the other details given can also be put on the Home tab/view in Deluxe and above.
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Notice the "Download asset class information" this is what it does (user can change manually).
Mixed/Multiple doesn't have any underlying detail as it does in Quicken Windows:
Except that the new Asset Allocation dashboard seems to reveal that there is underlying detail for "mixed/multiple" funds -- but it's not visible nor editable as it is in Quicken Windows. If the database contains this data, that's great, but we need a user interface to see/edit it. (Especially for users who have assets without a symbol Quicken can download, such a private funds or cryptocurrency.)
The goal of seeing Asset Allocation is to help guide decisions about balancing your portfolio, but because Quicken Mac is showing the asset class totals with no way to see what securities comprise each class, it's not useable to drive rebalancing decisions.
For instance: my Asset Allocation chart shows I have 13% small-cap stocks, even though I have no securities with that asset class -- so the 13% must be coming from assets coded as "Mixed/Multiple". But which ones? There's no way to know, and therefore no way to assess which funds I might want to increase or decrease in my holdings. Also: the smallest wedge of my Asset Allocation chart shows I have $23,976 classified as "Asset Mixture". What's that? No way to know.
@Chris_QPW I'm curious: it doesn't look like it from the screen shot above, but does Quicken Windows offer any way to track Sector Allocation in addition to Asset Allocation? The investing.quicken.com page for each security shows both the Asset Allocation (6 classifications: Stock, Bond, Other, Foreign Stock, Foreign Bond, and Cash) and Sector Allocation (11 classifications such as Consumer Cyclical, Financial Services, Technology, Real Estate, Energy, etc.). If Quicken showed both the Asset and Sector allocations for a user's portfolio, that would be very useful.
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19934 -
jacobs said:glennmacc said:ETF's and Mutual Funds all return to Mixed/ Multiple it seems.0
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jacobs said:
@Chris_QPW I'm curious: it doesn't look like it from the screen shot above, but does Quicken Windows offer any way to track Sector Allocation in addition to Asset Allocation? The investing.quicken.com page for each security shows both the Asset Allocation (6 classifications: Stock, Bond, Other, Foreign Stock, Foreign Bond, and Cash) and Sector Allocation (11 classifications such as Consumer Cyclical, Financial Services, Technology, Real Estate, Energy, etc.). If Quicken showed both the Asset and Sector allocations for a user's portfolio, that would be very useful.
The only time that shows up is in the Morningstar X-Ray Portfolio.
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BTW I will point out something about the ability to add asset classes, which I know has been requested on the Mac side and was recently added to the Windows side. To me it was obvious, but it seems it surprised a few people. On the Quicken Windows Investing tab -> Allocations view there is this graph.
The return/risk there becomes useless once you introduce new class types. A similar think can be said for the Morningstar X-Portfolio. What seems to happen there is that Quicken sends your securities to Morningstar and they do whatever evaluation they do and then return the results as a couple of web pages to display. So they aren't going line up with your custom classes.Signature:
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jlgg said:Two problems I've found in Investing in 6.3 1) Collapsing the graph in brokerage and account windows doesn't stick. Graph reappears whenever new account is selected 2) Account selection drop down tab now has no effect. Unable to select different combinations of accounts Thanks for your attention1
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BTW @Quicken Marcus besides the problem I mentioned above about mixing automatic reconcile with transactions being downloaded directly into the register I don't see how this statement is really true.This is a huge time-saving feature for those of you that use online balance reconciliation.
In Quicken Windows if I'm reconciling to online balances and have automatic reconcile off. It is literally two button hits to do exactly what automatic reconcile does. First I hit the reconcile button, and then the reconcile dialog comes up and then hit the Done button (which marks the transactions reconciled).
If I have automatic reconcile and automatic transactions entered into the register on, then when I download it does trigger the reconcile automatically and if it doesn't fail marks all the transactions reconciled. If it fails the reconcile dialog stays up for the user to fix the problem.
So I fail to see where this is a "huge time-saving feature". It seems like a trivial time-saver with the cost of possibly not having your transactions properly categorized because you are skipping the process of reviewing them to make sure that they are correct.
What I'm I missing in regards to how Quicken Mac has implemented this?Signature:
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@Chris_QPW I'm not sure if this helps or not, but in Quicken Mac reconcile/clr status is different from whether a transaction is marked as reviewed or not reviewed. From what I remember from my time in Quicken Windows, when transactions are marked as reconciled, they are also marked as reviewed (so they lose the blue dot or blue pencil indicator that they still need to be reviewed) and they can't then be marked for review again.
In Quicken Mac, marking a transaction (or transactions) as reconciled does not also mark the transactions as reviewed, so they retain the blue dot or blue pencil icon next to them, and registers can still be filtered by the status of "Not Reviewed". In addition, even if a transaction gets marked as reviewed, users can at any point change a transaction back to "Not Reviewed" again so it shows the blue dot/pencil as a way to remind yourself to go back and review a transaction again, even if it had been previously marked as reviewed. If I remember right (correct me if I'm wrong), you can't do this in Quicken Windows.
Because of this, the auto-reconcile issue that you brought up isn't an issue the same way it is for Quicken Windows, since users still need to mark transactions as reviewed even after they are reconciled. I like to think of it as the reconciliation verifying that the amounts are correct, but the reviewed status helps me know which ones I still need to verify/correct other information on, such as category or memo/notes.1 -
@Austin@ Thanks, yes that is exactly the part I was missing. If reconciling doesn't clear the review status then it makes sense that would work in the case of Quicken Mac.
In the case of Quicken Windows the reviewed status is cleared if the transaction is register or if the user edits the transaction in any way.Signature:
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odysseus said:It's great to see mortgage payments included in the budget, Marcus! I love the auto-reconcile feature as well. I saw that there's quite a clamoring on these boards for a real find and replace feature (present in Quicken 2007!). Is that on your list?
I don't think this is necessarily a replacement for Find and Replace but wanted to make sure people knew this was an option because I know from talking to a number of customers that this wasn't obvious to them.0 -
garysmith87 said:Any chance the Dashboard could be date selectable? I have to enter some security prices manually the day after, so having it "today only" view doesn't work for me. Thanks for the consideration.2
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hedstrom1014 said:I like the new features in QM 6.3
However I did notice that in my List of Securities, I had edited the Asset Class field on some of my securities, but now after each manual price update, some of the securities revert back to the default Asset Class name. For example; the ETF FHLC I edited to be Large Cap, but after a manual update it changes back to Mixed/Multiple.
How can I keep the Asset Class edit field to stay as I named it?0 -
Austin@ said:Lysander Spooner said:Dark mode looking good. I think you need to improve the row shading for scheduled events. In the light mode it is easy to see future events. In the beta dark mode there is no differentiation.0
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Chris_QPW said:
I do wonder about Automatic Reconcile mode though.
On the Windows side I have found that automatic transaction entry mode and automatic reconcile mode do not go well together. I would be interested in seeing how Quicken Mac addresses the following problem.
If I download transactions (with automatic reconcile off) I can now review the transactions because the new transactions are flagged.
With the blue dot/New I know to look at them are fix any problems.
If automatic reconcile is on, it will reconcile this with no problem because the amounts are all correct, but here it is after reconcile:
Two things happen after a reconcile, one is the Clr status goes to R, but the other is that the Status/blue dot column is cleared too.
So I think if this checkbox is off, when auto-reconcile kicks in, it will NOT automatically mark the transaction as reviewed keeping the blue dot to represent renaming, categorization, tagging and writing memos vs amount review.
Also, we have an auto-reconcile mode where we only tell you if auto-reconcile would have worked but don't actually auto-reconcile your transactions. This is for those that still like to manually reconcile but they can prioritize their time by seeing if Quicken thinks everything looks good or not. For example, if you only have a short amount of time, you may want to only take a look at all the accounts that theoretically would auto-reconcile because it should be a quick review. You can leave all the accounts that didn't auto-reconcile until a time when you have more time to investigate issues and look for discrepancies or duplicate transactions.1 -
@Quicken Marcus yes, I agree the implementation on this for Quicken Mac is a lot better than it is on Quicken Windows. Great job!Signature:
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Quicken Marcus said:
We do believe that being able to search and clean up your data is a critical use case within Quicken. As you know, the way to do this today is to go to the All Transactions view, search for what you're looking for using the search box. Then select the transactions you want to update and click on the Edit button in the toolbar to multi-edit the transaction.
I don't think this is necessarily a replacement for Find and Replace but wanted to make sure people knew this was an option because I know from talking to a number of customers that this wasn't obvious to them.Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19932 -
Quicken Marcus said:
Basically, we are actually saving the mixed-asset class down to its individual components which is coming from our quote provider. For example, I was just looking at Vanguard S&P500 Growth ETF (VOOG) and the asset mix is actually 91% Large Cap, 8% Small-Cap and 1% International. How do I know that? Well, I had to use Quicken Windows to find that out because Quicken Mac doesn't display it. Quicken Mac should. However, Quicken Mac is storing and using those percentages when it displays the asset mix charts on the dashboard even if we never show you the asset class percentages for a mixed-asset class.
1) As you say, there needs to be a UI added so users can see how Quicken is breaking down the asset classes of each security.
2) These asset classes for a mixed-asset class security need to be user-editable, because some users have securities which are not publicly traded for which Quicken can't download the breakdown of assets.
Quicken Windows does both #1 and #2 on the Edit Security screen. It seems you've already done the hard work by importing this data, storing it in the database, and using it for calculations; hopefully adding the UI to see/edit this data will prove to be a pretty easy enhancement.
3) There's a discrepancy, though, which I think you need to resolve. The Portfolio view, grouped by Asset Class, appears to be using the asset classes the user specifies for each security. (So for my Portfolio, "Asset Mixture" is my biggest asset class, about 38% of my total investments.) The Dashboard is using the far-more sophisticated method discussed above. (On my Dashboard, "Asset Mix" is less than 0.5% of my investments.) As a result, there are two places Quicken is showing Asset Allocation, and they completely and very significantly disagree with each other. That's obviously confusing and not optimal. I think the solution should be switching the Portfolio view to the advanced asset allocation calculations used for the Dashboard.Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19934 -
> @Quicken Marcus said:
> Consider the investment dashboard in v6.3 as v1.0. There's a lot we can and hope to improve on in future updates. It sounds like in your use case where you're manually entering in security prices, you may want the dashboard to always be looking one day back so you can actually see results vs always being today where it might be blank. We are definitely considering allowing one to set the day but I can't promise if this will be added or not or when. But with that said, thanks for providing a really good reason to allow people to set the date. It makes a lot of sense.
Marcus - First off, thanks for this update. Love the Dashboard and Dark Mode. Another vote for at least being able to view prior day performance on the dashboard for the reason that many of my investments in 401k accounts don't update their performance until near midnight, so unless I want to stay up for the purpose of seeing this for a few minutes until midnight rolls around and resets my performance to $0, this feature doesn't provide me and a lot of users in a similar situation benefit.1 -
Matt said:> @Quicken Marcus said:
> Consider the investment dashboard in v6.3 as v1.0. There's a lot we can and hope to improve on in future updates. It sounds like in your use case where you're manually entering in security prices, you may want the dashboard to always be looking one day back so you can actually see results vs always being today where it might be blank. We are definitely considering allowing one to set the day but I can't promise if this will be added or not or when. But with that said, thanks for providing a really good reason to allow people to set the date. It makes a lot of sense.
Marcus - First off, thanks for this update. Love the Dashboard and Dark Mode. Another vote for at least being able to view prior day performance on the dashboard for the reason that many of my investments in 401k accounts don't update their performance until near midnight, so unless I want to stay up for the purpose of seeing this for a few minutes until midnight rolls around and resets my performance to $0, this feature doesn't provide me and a lot of users in a similar situation benefit.0 -
@“Quicken Marcus” the following article might help.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/101215/how-often-are-mutual-fund-prices-updated.asp
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