failure to assign category

Jeanne

I'm pretty sure I'm looking at a bug, but I figured I'd inquire here and ask where to report it:

I've got an INCOME/EXPENSE report that fails to include four dividends from closed-end funds. When I dig down, I see that these are all identified as _MiscIncX. When I look at CATEGORIES in the report, I've got many of the built-in categories (e.g, _DivInc, _IntInc, etc.). But I cannot choose _MiscIncX. It is not listed.

However, if I modify the report to include the CATEGORY GROUPS Rental Income and Expense, these four will show up as Uncategorized. These will not appear if "uncategorized" is selected among categories, unless CATEGORY GROUPS includes Rental etc. It can't be just Rental Income or just Rental Expense either. It has to be both, neither of which I have any of.

Tracing the four deposits from the brokerage account to the linked checking account, they start out with "transfered $nn.nn" rather than a built in category like most investment income, and end up with the name of the parent account in the category field like all transfers.

If I create an INVESTMENT INCOME report, I can now choose the MiscIncX among ACTIONS (tho it still isn't listed as a category as similar actions are). If I select uncategorized, these four will show up as such. 

So the fact that these are uncategorized is not nearly as bad as their simply not showing up at all. That's my main complaint and, assuming I'm not missing something, I'd like to make sure the developers see it.

Thanks for any guidance,

Jeanne

Quicken Deluxe R38.30

Chris_QPW

I'm curious, what is the action type for the transaction?
(If you edit the transaction, it would be the text in the "Enter transaction:" field.)

Jeanne

The register shows "MiscIncX"  under ACTION, but when I edit the transaction, the "Enter transaction" field says "Inc - Income (Div, Int, etc.)" --just like those with "DivX" as the action and "_DivInc" as the category.

Chris_QPW

OK, now understand what is going on, and it isn't a bug (it is the way it was implemented, even though one could argue that it wasn't that good of an idea to do it this way).

The X at the end means that it has a transfer out as part of the transaction.

It is impossible to have one transaction has both a regular category and be a transfer.

When you look at an income/expense report you are looking at a report with only categories (not actions), so this transaction will appear in the transfer section.

If you look at an investment transactions report that shows the actions, you will actually see this transaction showing up as two lines.  One that captures the action, and the other that captures the transfer.  In the real world that is what really happened, Quicken Windows just provided a shortcut for it, but with the results of this problem with the fact that it will "hide" the dividend transaction from non-investment reports.

Example in the investment transaction report:


BTW Quicken Mac doesn't do this kind of combining of two separate transactions.

Jeanne

I'm not sure I really follow you, Chris, but there are whole lot of transfers that get assigned categories when they arrive in the brokerage account. Then when transferred to the the linked checking account, the category for this second transaction is just the parent/sending brokerage account name. This is true for all transfers except this orphaned action, MiscIncX. Indeed, it was a small discrepancy between the categories and the transfers that got me started on this.

So I'm pretty sure we do not have answers to:

• Why a _MiscInc category is unavailable in customizing the Income/Expense report while _DivInc and many similar are available.
• Why this action has no category at all when all other actions are assigned a category (as far as I can tell). The DivX action is assigned the category _DivInc and so on. But MiscIncX has none.
• Why these suddenly appear (as uncategorized) in the Income/Expense report when TWO completely unrelated category GROUPS are selected and will not appear otherwise.
• Why a MiscIncX ACTION IS available when customizing an Investment Income report (but no corresponding category like all (?) the other actions).
  
• And why these transactions still won't show up in the Investment Income report until I include the action "cash"; then they will appear in the report as uncategorized. And then drilling down gets one lots and lots of cash transactions and this handful of MiscIncX actions.

The way it is implemented is to assign categories to everything but this? This is a consciously designed feature? Seems odd to say the least.