Reconciliation Report

Question

Isn't there a report that after you do the reconciliation that prints what has and has not been cleared on the reconciled account?  I'm using Quicken for MAC  Thanks for any help you can give.

jacobs · Answer

@fijigirlann You say you understand what I wrote above, but don't understand why Quicken Mac is different than Quicken Windows — which means you don't actually understand what I wrote above. 🤣

The reason they're different is exactly what I wrote about: Quicken Windows has been developed continuously for more than 35 years, while Quicken Mac was started over from scratch last decade. The developers can't implement 35 years of programming in 8 or 10 years. A ton of progress has been made since the modern Quicken Mac launched 7+ years ago, but there are still many features, some large and some small, which exist in Quicken Windows which don't yet exist in Quicken Mac. and the developers are constantly having to choose which features they think have the biggest impact/benefit to work on next.

It's not that, as some people post on this site in frustration, they don't like the Mac. It's not that they don't respect/care about Mac customers. It's not that they're stupid or they're incompetent programers. It's simply that Quicken is a complex program, and adding features to it (without breaking the things which already exist) is a slower process than anyone — end users and the teams at Quicken — would like. And they don't generate enough revenue to fund a vastly larger team of programmers — so progress moves along in chunks as quickly as they can implement new features. The developers are continuing to add features every month or two, and piece by piece, Quicken Mac is getting closer in functionality to Quicken Windows. But there are still differences, and that will continue to be true for years to come.

fijigirlann · Answer

I understand all of this but why should the MAC version be any different from the Windows version?  I just changed from Windows to MAC so I guess I find out what else I'm missing as time goes on.

jacobs · Answer

It's quite simple, actually: they haven't considered it a higher priority than all the other things they've been working on. That doesn't mean they don't think it's worthwhile, as you suggest; it only means they haven't yet seen it as a top priority to implement.

I'd guess that they considered the implementation of Reconciliation History a year ago satisfied many users' needs for having a record of prior reconciliations, and adding a printed report was lower on the priority list. (For me personally, for instance, I've never felt the need to print each month's reconciliation report, as long as I can look back in Quicken and see what was reconciled when.)

As you may be aware, the current Quicken Mac is a rewrite of the legacy Mac program which was developed over about 25 years. And Quicken is a surprisingly complex program, so adding features is a slow-moving process. Here's the problem: there are more than 500 Idea posts in this forum alone for Quicken Mac, many of which are perfectly good and useful ideas — so the absence of a particular feature generally means nothing more than that they haven't gotten to it yet. The developers have to sift through all the feature requests and decide which ones have the biggest impact on the largest number of people, and have to evaluate how long they expect each item would take to incorporate in the program, and the schedule of the programmers and designers needed for each specific feature, among a variety of factors.

For anyone else reading this who thinks it's a desirable feature, there is an Idea thread on this forum requesting the addition of a printed reconciliation report. Take a few seconds to visit that thread and add your vote in favor of this feature (click the little dark gray arrow under the vote counter in the yellow box). That won't provide immediate help, but the more votes ideas like this get, the more likely the enhancement is to rise up the developers' priority list. This particular one has 149 votes (a combination of the vote counter and "legacy" votes which were cast when this forum was hosted on a different software platform), which is a fairly large number for Idea posts here. The Idea is tagged with a status of "Under Consideration", which means due to the number of votes, it has been forwarded to the product and development teams for consideration. In the somewhat peculiar way Quicken works, they don't marked an Idea as "Planned" once they agree it's a good idea; they only make it "Planned" when it has been assigned a specific time slot on their programming schedule. So a lot of ideas show "Under Consideration" for a long time, until they get assigned to specific programmers and designers to work on for a future release.