Net Worth Report is slightly buggy

Will Fiveash

When I edit the Net Worth by Year report that Quicken provides natively to just show this date range, 1/1/2019-12/31/2021, the report shows data from 2018-2021. This seems like a bug.

jacobs

It's not a bug; it's trying to be "helpful" and you're just misunderstanding what it's showing.

The Net Worth report over years uses the ending date you provide: in this case, December 31, 2021. If the report showed only 2019, 2020 and 2021 columns, the first column would be your net worth as of 12/31/2019. But you specified a starting date of 1/1/2019. Since it's showing December 31 of each year, it's providing your net worth as of 12/31/2018 -- which actually is your net worth as midnight at the very start of 2019. If you really want your net worth as of the end of January 1, change the starting date to 1/2/2019, and you'll see the report now shows in the first column your net worth as of the start of January 2, aka the end of January 1. Change the beginning date to any other date, and you'll see it always shows the net worth as of the end of the day prior, which is the value as of midnight of the date you've specified. I actually think it's a clever way to deal with the issue of the starting date.

Does that make sense? 

Will Fiveash

Quicken's behavior is not intuitive to me. Given I'm requesting yearly net worth, Quicken should allow me to specify the year range and only display net worth for those years on Dec 31.

Will Fiveash

For example I set a range of 12/31/2018-12/31/2021 and here is a screenshot of the report that Quicken produces which looks weird to me...

jacobs

You're right; that instance looks weird, and they probably should write some code to fix it. The issue is about how Quicken should interpret the user-entered start date: is it as of the start of the start date (as you'd want if your start date is the first day of a year or month) or as of the end of the start date (as you'd want if your start date is the end of a year or month). For instance, if you specify a date range with a start date of 1/1/18 you likely want the value as of the start of the year -- which is the value as of the end of the prior year.  You don't want the value as of the end of January 1, you want the value as of the start of January 1. So Quicken is handling this by providing the first column date as the ending value of the day prior to your specified starting date. 

So when doing a date range for net worth, we now understand Quicken is looking back one day prior to the specified start date, in order to capture the value as of the start of the start date instead of the end of the start date. So where you want a report showing 12/31/2018 through 12/31/21, just change your starting date to 1/1/19, and you'll get the report you want, with columns for 12/31/18, 12/31/19, 12/31/20 and 12/31/21. 

Make sense now?

The fix it seems to me they could make is to add some logic about the start date: if the start date is the first day of a month, use the ending value of the prior day (what it currently does), but if the start date is the last day of a month, use the ending value for that day, not the prior day.