Quicken 2007 reports still way better then Q6.1.1, is latest version any better?

LIDude

I have been wanting for YEARS to move from Quicken 2007 to the latest version of Quicken on the Mac. In fact, I have to keep an old Mac that is still able to run Quicken 2007 because of this. I simply can not understand how reporting in the newer versions of Quicken can continue to be inferior to that of Quicken 2007 now that new versions have been released for the past few years and especially given subscription sales model.

In Q2007 I have created a number of custom reports that I have been either unable to duplicate or could only duplicate by retroactively adding tags to thousands of past transactions and continuing to add tags simply to compensate for Q2007 reporting functionality no longer in versions of Q6.1.1.

I have a number custom category detail reports that are subtotaled and this had been difficult or impossible to duplicate. One example is I have a custom report show interest income sub-totaled by account. This allows me confirm my 1099-DIV statements and Quicken match. Since I have a few related accounts (i.e. Savings, Money Market, etc.) at a couple of banks I created a custom for each bank subtotaled by account if everything matched the grand totals would match the 1099-DIV.

Another example are Q2007 custom reports I created to track my mortgage payments. I have 1 report that show the total payment from my bank account for each mortgage payment on a single line on the report. 12 months, 12 lines. This was the total of a split transaction that split money to principle, interest expense and escrow. In Q6.1.1 all I can get is a report that shows EACH of the split transactions on its own line. So instead of seeing 1 line for each payment, the report shows 3 lines for each mortgage payment, 12 months shows 36 less than useful lines.

Even more egregious is the investment reporting. In Q2007, I could create reports by security. In Q6.1.1, securities are listed as "Payees" and there are no options to report investments by Security or "Payee". Again, I need to match things like Dividend income, capital gains/losses by security on tax reports. An example is in Q2007, I have a custom report that shows dividend income subtotaled by Security with the grand total on the report showing the Dividend income for that investment account. I need this functionality as I have some individual DRIPS (Dividend Re-Investments) I track in a single account. I have been unable to truly duplicate this in Q6.1.1. Category reports that show investment transactions can't even display the Investment Action (buy, sell, div, etc.). The only way I could even get close to a dividend income report sub-totaled by security would be to create a "Div-{SecurityName}" tag and MANUALLY tag each DIV transaction. Then I could create a category report subtotaled by Tag report. This is insane. I gave up here, but also need Portfolio Transaction Reports by Security (i.e. Buy, Sell, etc.)


Does the latest version of Quicken on the Mac have any better reporting?

smayer97

I do not have answers for the report functionality, but you can continue to use QM2007 on any Intel-based Mac using a VM (Virtual Machine), though this is not for everyone. And if you are running macOS 10.15 or newer, you can get VMWare Fusion 12 for free.

See Running Quicken for Mac 2007 in a Virtual Machine (VM)

jacobs

There have not been major changes in reports since last February (when version 6.1.1 was released).

Some of the things you're looking to do can be done in Quicken Mac, but they may be different or require a different aproach than what you're used to. And some can be done, but require exporting to a spreadsheet for subtotaling in the specific way you want. And yes, it would be nice to have some additional features, such as the option to suppress split lines.

I need to match things like Dividend income, capital gains/losses by security on tax reports. An example is in Q2007, I have a custom report that shows dividend income subtotaled by Security with the grand total on the report showing the Dividend income for that investment account. 

In the Tax Schedule report, Dividend income is subtotaled by security, with a grand total. Capital Gains are not subtotaled by security, but you could export the report, sorts those rows by security, and create subtotals. Would it be preferable to be able to do this inside Quicken? Sure. But this is something you likely do once a year, so if it takes a few minutes once a year, I see it as something which can be pretty easily worked around. 

Somewhat similarly, for a report of your loan payments, showing only the gross amounts without splits, you can't do it in Quicken Mac. But you can select those transactions in the register, export them, and edit  a spreadsheet to show the data you want. 

I simply can not understand how reporting in the newer versions of Quicken can continue to be inferior to that of Quicken 2007 now that new versions have been released for the past few years and especially given subscription sales model.

It's simple, actually. The developers have requests for hundreds of features. They are steadily working on the list, but the progress is slow. And the big thing is that among the base of Quicken users, people consider many different things to be top priorities. You may consider improved reporting capabilities paramount, but someone else thinks it should be investment analysis tools, a retirement planner, handling cryptocurrencies, better budgeting, security divestitures and acquisitions, lender loans, savings goals, and on and on. And no one is right or wrong; these are all tools which existed in Quicken 2007 or Quicken Windows which would be useful to some Quicken users. But the developers can't tackle them all, or even a decent fraction of them all, very quickly because Quicken is a complicated program and adding features is a slow process. Each year, it definitely gets better, but if your top priority isn't among them, then it can be frustrating. The subscription pricing model has nothing to do with it, though; subscriptions didn't make them suddenly able to develop features five times faster. 

smayer97

Yes, the answer is simple... QMac STILL does not do many things that some still rely on in QM2007. Yes there are workarounds for some of those shortcomings. It then becomes a question of how much are you willing to accept the workarounds where they exist, how much are you willing to live without some capabilities, all vs the challenge of continuing to maintain QM2007 in some working form (which I am still one of those).

That answer is very individual.

LIDude

Thanks for the answers.

At some point I may look into the VM, however, it seems more trouble than it is worth at this time.

In regards to reports, being able to create the same types of reports in the current version of Quicken that I am able to create in Quicken 2007 to me is not a feature enhancement/request, it is a feature restoration issue. This is a missing feature that in my opinion should have already been restored to Quicken.

As a frustrated Quicken for Mac user, I feel I have every right to expect reporting functionality to be restored back to what was available in Q2007, and frankly, reports should really be significantly better than what is available in Q2007. It is 2022 (15 years later). It seems many users are exporting data to manipulate in other programs and at least some of this would be rendered unnecessary if the latest version of Quicken had the same reporting capabilities that exist in Quicken 2007.

I have been frustrated since the release of Quicken Essentials. This was the "latest" version of Quicken, but a huge number of users could not use the program because it didn't track investments. Furthermore, the original Quicken 2007 was not designed to run on Intel based processors so when Apple moved to Intel processors they had no choice but do something to address the issue that Essentials did not handle investments. Instead of coming out with a new version of Quicken based on the Q2007 code to fill the gap until the new Quicken would handle investments, they simply put a bandaid on the problem and developed a patch you could apply to Quicken 2007 to get it to run on Intel based processors.

One way to look at reporting in new vs old Quicken, is to think about using a smartphone to text someone. Now imagine the newest version of the smartphone "updated" the full software based keyboard to the numeric key pad experience you had with early flip phones where you had a numeric keypad that also had letters on the numbers. You could make calls just fine, however, if you want to text someone, you would have to press the number key that corresponds to the letter you want to type multiple times until it gets to the letter you want, in the correct case. You can type a message like this, but why would you ever want to go back to this input method on a new smartphone when your existing smartphone has a full keyboard? And if you want to take that analogy one step further, lets say they removed they letters from the numeric keypad entirely, however, they only made these change on smartphones, so tablets still have a full software keyboard. So, you could carry both the new smartphone and a tablet to get the functionality you already had in your original cell phone.

Cleary they are making updates to Quicken, however, the fact is there remains a functionality gap the latest version of Quicken vs Q2007. I really don't think it is unreasonable after 15 years to ask or even expect the developers to prioritize filling the functionality gaps that would allow the Q2007 users to move to the latest and greatest Quicken.

jacobs

LIDude said:

In regards to reports, being able to create the same types of reports in the current version of Quicken that I am able to create in Quicken 2007 to me is not a feature enhancement/request, it is a feature restoration issue. This is a missing feature that in my opinion should have already been restored to Quicken. As a frustrated Quicken for Mac user, I feel I have every right to expect reporting functionality to be restored back to what was available in Q2007, and frankly, reports should really be significantly better than what is available in Q2007. It is 2022 (15 years later).

@LIDude You're entitled to feel frustrated. But playing with semantics — "feature enhancement" versus "new feature" versus "feature restoration" — is pretty much pointless. Allow me to recap the short version of how we got here…

In 2006, Intuit started over building a new Quicken Mac from scratch. The first thing developed never made it out of beta testing. By 2010, they release Quicken Essentials, not because it was done, but because they thought it was better than nothing. then they came up with the hail Mary to license the code to make Quicken 2007 work on the modern Mac operating system, so it bought them some time. But the person in charge of Quicken left the company, and development of Quicken Mac stalled for two years. Finally, Intuit created a small — under 5 people, I believe — team to work on updating Quicken Essentials to work with newer changes in the Mac operating system and to build investments, the single most critical feature missing in Essentials. They finally released what was essentially the 2.0 version of Essentials, rebranded as Quicken Deluxe for Mac, in fall 2014. It lacked lots of features longtime Quicken users wanted and expected, but the promised to keep working and adding more features month by month. In 2016, Intuit sold off Quicken, and they were able to enlarge the programming team, but lots of time went into infrastructure changes to support moving away from Intuit, and ever-changing banking security changes. Year by year since then, a significant number of new features get added, but the process has taken much longer than the product manager and the CEO thought it would. So here were are in 2022 with a better… yet still incomplete… yet still improving, Quicken Mac. 

So yes, you can argue that report features from Quicken 2007 should have already been built. And no one can really disagree; I think we all — end users, programmers, and management at Quicken — wish there was more functionality complete and less remaining on the to-do list. But the reality is that they don't have the resources to go faster, and so they constantly look at the list of hundreds and hundreds of feature requests and decide which ones will have the greatest impact, affect the greatest number of users, or add something that can't be accomplished via a workaround, and they chip away at the features list.

You can say that improved reports should be number one. But I can point you to many posts on this site where users make the same pitch for some other feature which they consider "basic", "shocking by its omission", or an "obvious top issue". Like budget users who can't get an accurate actual-versus-budget report without exporting to a spreadsheet. Like investors (including everyone in Canada) for whom Quicken can't properly calculate realized gains because it does only FIFO and LIFO, but not average cost basis. Like investors who have owned a stock which has split into two companies, and lack any good way to handle the divestiture in Quicken while retaining their cost basis in both because a spin-off/divestiture feature hasn't been built yet. Like people who need to calculate sales taxes on split transactions who pine for something like the QuickMath feature in Quicken 2007. Like people who migrated from Quicken Windows and are stunned to find the Liefetime/Retirement Planner and Savings Goals features don't exist in Quicken Mac. And on and on; it's a long list — you get the idea. 

You wrote: "I feel I have every right to expect reporting functionality to be restored back to what was available in Q2007," and better. You can expect whatever you want, but your expectations don't align with reality. Quicken 2007 was the culmination of more than two decades of program development, and the decade plus of development of the next-generation program (subtracting some time when development was dead in the water) has not yet gotten the program to match its predecessor feature for feature. That will still take years.

So, you can keep trying to make Quicken 2007 work for you on an old Mac. Or you can move to the new Quicken Mac and find ways to make it work well enough to meet your needs. Or you can move to some other program which you feel does everything Quicken does and then some. (Some people find alternatives they're satisfied with; many people find nothing does all the things Quicken does.) Those three options accept the reality of the situation. Talking about your expectations and things you feel should have been done in the past is fine if you want to vent — and many of us have over the years — but in the end, you have to accept reality and decide what will work best for you.

I'm a fellow Quicken user like you. I played with modern Quicken Mac since 2014, but only made my final switch from Quicken 2007 two years ago when I decided the new program was finally good enough for my needs. There's some stuff I like better than Quicken 2007; there are some things I miss from Quicken 2007 — but overall, it meeds my needs well enough. Each Quicken user's needs are different, so what's good enough for me isn't good enough for everyone, and I understand that. In some cases, finding different ways of doing things can help people power past or around the shortcomings; in some cases, not. 

I hope this helps put some things in perspective. If not, don't shoot the messenger. Best wishes.

LIDude

Thanks for the reply. I was aware of most of the history you provided.

I probably should have mentioned I have been using Quicken since August 1992. I went back and checked my Quicken purchases from the transactions I entered in Quicken, one of the benefits of entering data in Quicken. I have used the version of Quicken I purchased in 1992 which I did not record with a version number, Quicken v4, v5, v6, v7, Quicken98, Q2000, Q2003, Q2004 and Q2007.

With almost 30 years of financial data in Quicken if I decided to move to another program I would likely have to start over as I don't know there is any reliable way to export/import all my data to an alterative system. I would be happy to simply move to the Quicken for Windows, but I'm sure you are all aware of the issues with attempting to move data containing investment transactions from Mac Quicken to Windows Quicken. Thus, I remain a Quicken for Mac user.

I came here to find out about the reporting capabilities in the current version vs. Q2007 and those questions have been answered. Thanks for your replies.

I would like some advice on the best way to add my votes to "Product Ideas" area to bring back all the Q2007 reporting functionality not in the current version. I assume it is better to vote for existing requests, instead just creating all new ones. I did read a few, however, before I search through all the requests, I figured I ask:

Does anyone know if there is a single request that specifically covers all the reporting Q2007 Report functionality?

OR

If there is not a single request, does anyone have a list of all the respective posts that covers all requests for Q2007 reporting functionality not currently in the new version of Quicken?


Lastly, I have a question for smayer97. A post you added contains a consolidated list of links to individual suggestions you can click on to and vote for. A lot of these links go to an external website (getsatisfaction.com) that is currently returning a 503 error. Don't know if this is permanent thing. Can you take a look at this and advise? This post is at: https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7312667/list-of-requests-for-report-types-in-quicken-for-mac-297-legacy-votes#latest

Thanks

jacobs

The best Idea requests for the development team are targeted ideas. When broader and more encompassing Ideas get posted, two things can go wrong: (1) users add related issues so the actual enhancement request becomes diffused, and (2) the developers implement part of the request, but not all the related issues, yet consider the request done.

For certain, any request that says, "just make it like Quicken 2007!" isn't well received by the developers (and is often ignored). First, the development team is quite often not as well-versed on intricate details of Quicken 2007 as longtime users. (I'd guess that most, if not all, of the current developers never used Quicken 2007.) Even if a few of them are familiar with Quicken 2007, they're not interested in mimicking software which was developed 20 or more years ago unless they understand how it will benefit users today. There are lots of small features and quirks in Quicken 2007 which were implemented for one reason or other over its 20+ years of development, and they don't always know whether a particular feature from the old software is something people use and need today. In short: they are looking for why people want a particular feature, or how a particular feature would be used; use cases really help them understand the need.

Let me take a paragraph to give what I think is a great example of this: the Year-End Copy feature in Quicken 2007, used to create a new data file with only data past a user-specified date. This feature was created originally because of file size limits and stability issues with the old, quirky database used by the legacy Quicken for Mac. When the new Quicken Mac was developed, they intentionally didn't spend time building such a feature. Why? Because the modern SQL database used by Quicken Mac simply doesn't have those file size or stability issues at all. Yet users immediately asked for this feature in the first year, and the developers said no. Their perception — which I believe was mostly correct at the time — was that some users were used to splitting off a new file every year, and they were asking for this feature because "it's the way I've always done it." But the developers knew that the reason people got in that habit was tied to the old program, and it was unnecessary with the new program, so they rejected the request to add the feature. Over time, however, users have been able to articulate some very good reasons for wanting to purge their old data, generally related to "life events" (retired now, kids are grown now, divorced/remarried now, etc.). As I read some of those use cases, I became convinced there was a need for such a feature, where previously I didn't think it was needed. The developers haven't commented on this issue in a while, but if they read the currently-active Idea post on this topic, I think they'd "get it" and see why there is a practical reason — not just to mimic Quicken 2007, not just because people "always did it" in the past — for such a feature.

So that brings me back to your good question about the best way to advocate for features you want to see in the program. I agree that if you can find an existing Idea post for a feature you'd like to see, it's best to pile onto that one. Add your vote, and then add a post with your reason for wanting the feature. (Adding a post makes the thread jump to the top of the page, so more people may see it, click on it, and then vote for it.) If you don't see an Idea for a specific feature need, then by all means create a new Idea post for it. It will take a while for any new Idea to amass many votes, because they made this site so sprawling that many users don't hunt through the 11 different Quicken Mac Idea sub-categories, but Ideas can and do rise up enough to be pushed in front of the developers.

This brings me to your question about some of the posts by @smayer97. In a previous incarnation of this community forum, hosted on a different software platform, the feature requests were a jumbled mess, so he undertook the massive task of trying to create index posts for various categories of requests, with links to individual Idea posts. The need for those indexes were significantly diminished when Quicken moved onto this site and created the 11 separate sub-categories for Mac product ideas. But two things have happened to make those original organizing posts less useful today than they were in the past: (1) In the transition from the last platform (GetSatisfaction) to this one, many of the links in those index posts became broken because they pointed to the URLs of the old site; there was no way to automatically update them. (For a time, there were redirects in place to make those links work, but then GetSatisfaction was sold, and the redirects were permanently broken.) Some of the links have been updated over time, by smayer97 and by others, but many are broken. (2) Many of the ideas from the early days of modern Quicken Mac were broad, or contained multiple feature requests, and over time the developers implemented part but not all the idea. So continuing to vote for an Idea becomes muddled what people are actually asking for, and the developers may say "hey, we did that back in 2019" and never read the more recent posts.

If you find one of those broken links, you can often find the post if you do a search for the text in the URL. The Search feature on this site isn't the best, so I have found it much better to use Google site searches: start your Google search with "site:community.quicken.com" followed by the search terms, and you're quite likely to find it. So let's say you were interested in the Reconciliation Report feature, one of the links within the post you listed. The URL is "https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/add-reconciliation-report-to-quicken-for-mac" which points to GetSatisfaction.com and fails. But if you take the words and do a Google search for "site:community.quicken.com add reconciliation report to quicken for mac", the Idea post you're looking for will come up in the first few search results. 

Again, for some of the report issues you were originally mentioning, if you can't find an Idea that is directly about the need you have, or clearly encompasses the need you have, don't hesitate you create a new Idea post. When you do, spend time making sure the subject line is clear, so it attracts eyeballs. And make the initial post relatively short and direct about what's being asked for, so it's clear for readers — and so the voting box doesn't require lots of scrolling to see. Some Idea posts fail to gain traction simply because the subject line isn't clear, or the explanation fo the feature request isn't clear. I sometimes create an Idea post with a paragraph or two, and then add a comment to my own post to provide examples or flesh out the need for the feature, so that the initial post isn't too long.

Sorry to be so long-winded again, but you asked some good questions, and I hope my long reply helps point you in the right direction.

jon857

It's terrific to find this page and read the commentary of all of you very experienced QM users. I'm a relative newly, I started using Quicken in the early oughts. I have held onto QM2007 until last year because it functioned the way I needed to to keep cash flow and investments organized and informative. Now, with server support for Quotes discontinued and the adoption of Quicken Direct by a number of institutions using QM2007 means manual entry of everything; For this I could use a spreadsheet but there are obvious disadvantages to that route. I hear that it requires a lot of manpower to bring QM6.5.1 subscription up to speed with QM2007 but with the cash flow from yearly subscriptions and the number of years that this platform has been published it is a sorry excuse. Its about time that Quicken publish a yearly schedule for improvements that they aim to tackle so their loyal user community can understand their goals for the product and give us a reason to be patient. This is one MAC user that tired of looking through an opaque lens.

jacobs

@jon857 I don't think they will ever publish yearly schedules of planned improvements. I'm sure they have their internal plans, but the complexity of the code makes it difficult to accurately forecast how long it will take to implement certain features. Layer on top of that external facts they also can't fully predict. For example, a few years ago, their bill payment partner decided to get out of the business, and they had to find a new partner and develop the programming for the current check pay and quick pay. Another example: the rush to complete new connectivity code to meet a deadline set by Schwab, followed by more time to fix a host of problems. While things like this are planned, the schedules for factors involving the outside world require other things on the schedule to be deferred. And sometimes internal projects which require coordination between the different Quicken Mac, Quicken Windows, and Quicken Cloud teams requires schedules to be changed. And on top of all that, they likely don't want their competitors to know a year in advance what they're working on. 

RonMiddag

I have to agree with LIDude. Quicken for Mac took a serious step backward after Quicken 2007. Many things went backward, not only reporting capability. Quicken 2007 was much more configurable than any version since. Yes, over the 15 years since Q2007 there have been improvements and many new features but if I had a choice, I would still be using Q2007... Your admission that no one on the development team likely ever used Q2007 is a slam to your longest, most loyal customers...

jacobs

@RonMiddag I'm a fellow Quicken user like you, not a representative of Quicken, so I'm not "admitting" anything. I've been following Quicken's progress for a long time, so I can repeat things said by folks at Quicken, and speculate reading between the lines. I've used Quicken on a Mac for nearly 30 years, so I'm well aware of where Quicken 2007 is superior to the current Quicken Mac, as well as some ways current Quicken Mac is superior to the legacy product.

Of course Quicken took a step backward after Quicken 2007. That program had more than 20 years of software development. The new Quicken Mac was a start-and-stop project at former parent Intuit over a period of about 6 years; work was restarted in 2012 with only a handful of developers allocated to the project. After Quicken became independent from Quicken, the size of the development team has been increased, and the addition of features has steadily continued — albeit more slowly than anyone would wish. But the modern Quicken Mac is still much younger than the program it replaced, so it's not too surprising it still doesn't have all the features of its predecessor. Year by year, it's getting closer.