wasted screen real estate- reconcile screen Q-Mac

tcm8311

Q-Mac on the reconcile screen. Literally 1/2 of the top of my screen is full of summary and big font numbers.. big block not-equal sign... other buttons...

Please provide a method to shrink this down and make more room for register rows.
Maybe a collapse arrow.

RickO

The header area on the reconcile screen takes less than 1/4 of the screen height on my screen. I like it just the way it is.

tcm8311

not sure what size screen you're using, or how you managed to get it down to 1/4 of your screen... I'm not asking for them to change what you have.. I'm asking for them to add a "+/-" or "V/^" buttons to shrink that area so there's more room for transactions on the reconcile screen. see the screen shot attached.. the wasted real-estate at the top drives me nuts, as I open the PDF of the bank statement on the same screen... to reconcile the transactions.

jacobs

@tcm8311 When the developers redesigned the reconcile screens a year ago (version 6.2 last May), there were a number of suggestions offered, both in beta and in public, to shrink the size of the reconcile window header. The developers didn't act on those suggestions. I think part of what they were designing for is making the header info stand out to avoid confusion some users experienced with the previous more-condensed design. I don't think there were ever any explanations offered for why they didn't tighten up the space a bit. (The developers and designers likely work on large-screen monitors most of the time. And they're likely mostly younger than many Quicken users, who consider readability a bigger issue than people with younger eyes. ) 

I agree with you that there's wasted white space… but I don't find it enough of an issue to "drive me nuts." In your screen shot, all the headers above the transaction list occupy close to 40% of the space. When I reconcile on my 13" laptop, I get 21 lines of transactions using the "Compact" row height spacing I typically use; I can get 27 lines if I switch to "Tiny" line spacing. (I'm not sure why you get only 17 lines in your screenshot; I guess your Dock has fewer items and is taller than mine.) In your screenshot, you have about 10 days of transactions visible, so there's some scrolling to move through a month of transactions, but it's not a huge amount; even if they redesigned the screen so you gained several more transactions onscreen at a time, you'd only reduce your need to scroll slightly. 

So… can you improve the existing experience so it doesn't drive you nuts? One suggestion I'd offer is to re-order your columns. I have Charge, Clr, Payment next to each other, where you have payment off to the right away from Charge.  I think this makes it more like my bank and credit card statements, and easier to quickly spot numbers as I reconcile. 



If your statement is strictly in date order, as is the case with a credit card statement, and your Quicken reconcile screen is in date order, I find it pretty easy to work down the list of transactions checking them off versus the credit card statement. Of course the order may be slightly different due to posting date differences and/or different order of charges on the same day, but they're pretty closely in order, so I find I don't have to do a lot of scrolling to accomplish the test.

If you're reconciling a bank statement, it can be helpful to click on different column headers to resort your transactions if your bank separates out checks, credits and debits on the statement. For instance, I click the check number column to sort by check number, so I can check off all the cleared checks which my bank lists in numerical order; then I click on Deposit to sort all the deposits together, so I can check them off against the bank statement's list of deposits; then I click on Date to re-sort the list to check off the remaining withdrawals from the account.

And maybe some day, the designers will tighten up the space. But since they just visited this last year, I'm guessing they have other areas of the program to work on before they re-visit the reconcile screen.