Add an option to re-order accounts in the sidebar (Q Mac) (+1 Merged Vote)

jacobs

@Brad L Vandermoon You’re correct. There is a note from the Quicken moderators at the top of this thread which says:

Development team is considering allowing re-ordering accounts within their subgroup only; groups and subgroups cannot be re-ordered.

That’s not going to accomplish what users have been asking for. Simply re-arranging the order of accounts within the existing groups and subgroups is helpful, but only to a limited extent. (And some of us already do this by simply using numerical prefixes on account names — e.g. “1-XYZ Visa”, “2-ABC Mastercard”, etc.)

Users are asking for the ability to move accounts to different group/subgroup headings, and ideally, to be able to make their own groups/subgroups. This is especially important to people who have a savings/checking-type account at a brokerage, which Quicken currently puts under Brokerage accounts.

tcolyer

I can't imagine why the Quicken Team would resist creating maximum flexibility for users to move accounts to the maximum in order to best meet user needs. I certainly support this request.

Brad L Vandermoon

hey quicken, just saw a new release come, and it still does not include this enhancement. the enhancements you provide in this release are so non-important/not really desired (change the tax report, a little better net worth card). come on …. the enhancement requested here will make your product so much better. why wouldn't you implement this?

jacobs

@Brad L Vandermoon Three quick notes…

(1) The developers and management don’t read all these comments except when they’re working on a particular feature. Posting a note to “Hey Quicken” asking them to make this a priority is not going to be read by anyone who could decide to make this a priority.

(2) This idea is still marked as “Under Consideration”, which means the developers do not yet have it in their schedule for implementation. It may get done somewhere down the road, but to avoid feeling disappointed with each release this year, I suggest not expecting to see this anytime soon.

(3) If you read the note from the developers in the yellow box on the first page of this thread, you’ll see that they do not plan to implement free rearrangement of the sidebar, and are only considering implementing rearrangement within an existing subgroup. So even if they get around to implementing this, their implementation will likely fall short of what many users would like. It’s also worth noting that you can already rearrange accounts within a subgroup simply by adding numerical prefixes to your account names — e.g. “1-XYZ Visa, 2-ABC Amex”.

As for why they haven’t made this a priority, we’ll never know… but I can speculate. 😀 Allowing users to rearrange the sidebar is a “nicety” — it adds no new capabilities to what Quicken Mac can do, it just allows users to organize the tools better to their liking. The developers sometimes implement niceties like this, but most of their time goes into adding features/functionality to do things users previously could not do.

Brad L Vandermoon

you point our problems with no solutions. also not sure where you get your info about quicken people following or not following. do i think they actively follow stuff here …. no. i do think they would passively get info from here for the most active threads.

Jon

You've already made it clear you want this feature; repeating the same complaint over & over isn't adding anything to the thread. If you could think of a new reason why this is a useful feature - a reason that hasn't already been mentioned - that might help convince them to put this on their development schedule.

Chris_QPW

no. i do think they would passively get info from here for the most active threads.

I do too (think that they get information from the most active threads), but this certainly isn't one of them. The most active threads are when a feature like downloading of transactions from a very popular financial institution stops working. We are talking lots of people and hundreds of comments. Not one person complaining. And I might add there are anti-spamming rules to the forum, so if one person just thinks they can fill up a thread with comments and get what they want they might be surprised at the actions taken by the moderators.

With that being said, the moderators have said that when they do pass on some information from here, and at times they developers do look at this forum, but like the others have said, mostly when they are looking for certain information for something they have been tasked with.

If the developers spend time here, they aren't spending time doing their job. For an Idea like this that has already been reviewed by the development group, they most likely are not going to spend any more time on it. It is in their system, and they have tons more in their system to work on, again it just isn't a good use of their time to keep reevaluating things like this. At least until, this feature is more important to more people.

ejoenelson

I would like to reorder the accounts because a recent software upgrade reordered my accounts without my knowledge.

jacobs

I would like to reorder the accounts because a recent software upgrade reordered my accounts without my knowledge.

@ejoenelson I believe there's only one small change made in the sidebar in recent software updates. In version 7.6, the developers changed the subheadings under the Banking heading, which used to be Cash, Savings, Credit Card: they pulled checking accounts from being included in the "Cash" subheading and put them under their own "Checking" subheading. In doing that, they put Cash before Checking, and a number of users asked them to switch those two, so the much more often-used Checking section would come before Cash. That fix was made in version 7.7. So the total change over these two updates amounted to this small change:

v7.5 and earlier:

v7.7:

The one interesting offshoot of what happened in 7.6 and 7.7 showed that the developers can set the order of the headings/subheadings int he sidebar. So if the developers can assign the order of the account sections in the sidebar, it seems it might be possible for them to build a little mapping table so that users can specify their own order of the account sections in the sidebar. Note that this would fall short of allowing users to create their own custom account groups, but re-ordering the existing groups might still be useful to some users.

(Edited by @Jon: replaced text tables with screen shots for clarity since Vanilla didn't want to format the text correctly.)

J Mc

I like to order my credit card accounts by the date my payment is due to make sure I have enough cash on hand. This would be very useful to me and others IMO.

That said, all, thank you for such a great job improving Quicken. Love the job you are doing.

jacobs

I like to order my credit card accounts by the date my payment is due to make sure I have enough cash on hand. This would be very useful to me

@J Mc You actually can re-order your accounts within an account group. The trick is to add a numerical prefix to the account names. It could be 1, 2,3… or it could be your actual due dates in the month, like this:

03-Citi Visa
11-Hilton Amex
17-Chase Visa
24-Citi AA Mastercard

I use numerical prefixes so my most frequently-used cards are first, followed by store cards and infrequently-used cards. Hopefully the developers will some day give us better tools to customize our left sidebar, but this workaround helps a bit.

nomadintrovert

Personally, I find it more effective to group by institution name, since I give my accounts nicknames. It would be nice to see something like (example shown):

Bank of America

• Vacation Fund
• House Downpayment
• Rainy Day Fund

Capital One

• Home Improvements
• Gardening Fund

I also admit to being quirky with how I organize, so I think giving users the option would be great (I did upvote).

Brad L Vandermoon

I really do not understand why quicken would not allow three levels of "tags" for each account and then allow the sidebar to display by tags or by account type grouping. this would give maximum flexibility. fairly easy to implement as well:

1. add tags for each account in their account settings.
2. then add the ability to select sidebar view with options of : "group by tags" or "group by type".

jacobs

@Brad L Vandermoon I don't see how Tags could be used to organize the sidebar, unless "tags for accounts" were implemented differently than existing tags for transactions, because multiple tags can be applied to any transaction.

But the developers have indicated they aren't planning to allow complete customization of items in the sidebar, so unless they reverse that stance, we won't even be able to manually re-arrange the sidebar, let alone having multiple ways to do so with the addition of account tags.

Brad L Vandermoon

the way i use account tag here should not be confused with transaction tags. the only thing that would need to be done is to account settings a new tab labeled account tags. that screen would have input for "level one tag", "level two tag", and "level three tag". i'd label some of my accounts so would display in sideview like the below:

level 1: investing

level 3: brokerage

account 0

account 1

blah

level 3: retirement

account 2

account 3

blah

level 3: retirement-managed

account 4

account 5

blah

jacobs

@Brad L Vandermoon Yes, that's the type of customization of the sidebar the developers have previously said they wll not implement due to unspecified complications. Custom groups would have ramifications for other areas of the program, including budgets and reports. This old thread is now archived and no longer visible

Things change, so maybe they'll rethink it at some point, as the last sentence above, and the non-rejected status of this thread — may suggest.