Register Information

adunn2285

I have been a member of the Quicken community for 7 years now and I love it! I have a question though.... Is there a way to hide past years worth of data without changing the beginning amount that show at the top of the register? Anytime I limit the time frame it always tells me I am negative in balance because it will not carry over the previous months.

[Deleted User]

That used to be a feature of Microsoft Money that I really liked.  No matter what time frame you chose, it would always show the correct running balance, and ending balance.  When I moved to Quicken in 2009, that is the feature I missed the most, and still do.  I just learned to "live with" showing the full registers and scrolling down to the bottom of the registers to see current activity.  I am curious to see what others say about this.

[Deleted User]

UPDATE - Ok I went back to several of my accounts and chose several different time periods and they do now show the correct running balance and ending balance, no matter what time period I chose.  WOW.  When did that change?  

@adunn2285 I think I understood what you were asking, but for me, it seems to be working like you want.

Chris_QPW

They changed this a few years because of requests from people that used Microsoft Money in the past, but it does come with some pretty big caveats and will only work properly with certain filters set.

At the basic level Quicken and Microsoft Money did the register quite differently.
Quicken's register is like a report, the balance is normally calculated based on what transactions are visible.  Microsoft Money on the other hand had a stored balance for every transaction.  So, with Quicken filtering can affect the balance on any given transaction, whereas with Microsoft Money you got the same balance on each transaction no matter how you filtered the transactions.

As a compromise a few years ago Quicken was changed that for some filtering like where you set the date range to like "This Month" or "Last XX Days" it would start with the balance of the transaction just before that period and then calculate from then on.  But there are some combinations like "Last Year" where it will not add in the amount of the transaction before the start of that period.

What do you have set for your filtering of the account?
Also, I should have mentioned that the sorting order can affect this too.
If you aren't sorted by Date it will certainly not add up correctly.
So, what column are you sorted on?

A screenshot of the filters and the column header line might help.
You can drag and drop an image on the comment box to attach it.

[Deleted User]

Thanks @Chris_QPW.  I used to check every once in a while to see if it's been changed to show the correct running balance.  I only noticed the update yesterday when checked it out again.  So it is very odd that I never noticed it before since you say that it was changed for a few years.  Yes you are right.  It doesn't work exactly the same as MS Money, but it is an improvement and makes selecting date ranges more useful.