Can I restore some of the Quicken 2007 Mac functionality in reports

Dr_B

I've recently purchased a new MBP and purchased Quicken 2022 Premium under the assumption that Quicken 2007 would no longer be compatible with the current MacOS and M1 chip.

I need to see the full category in reports, e.g. in QM2007 I would have the following two categories:

for my business I used -
Work:Travel:meals

For personal travel I used -
Travel:meals

In QM2007 the full category description appears in the reports but in Q2022 only 'meals' appears. Is there any way to configure Q2022 to show the full category name in transaction and report windows?

Also, is there any way to embed multiple groupings of reports. In QM2007 I could easily specify columns as time intervals (say monthly or annual for P/L statements) and subtotal the categories at the subcategory or class level. I can't figure out how to do this in Q2022 even though this is really the most basic of SQL group tasks.

The reporting in Quicken 2022 seems to be too clever by half. I fear I will have to keep my old computer on life support so that I can continue to us QM2007. I have 20+ years of tax reporting procedures based on the earlier version(s) of Quicken and it appears to be too difficult to reproduce its functionality.

If anyone can point me to a list of things to do to facilitate a move from QM2007 to Q2022 in order to retain as much commonality as possible, I would really appreciate it.

jacobs

Dr_B said:

In QM2007 the full category description appears in the reports but in Q2022 only 'meals' appears. Is there any way to configure Q2022 to show the full category name in transaction and report windows?

If you are doing a report by categories — Transactions by Category or Category Summary — then you will see the full path of each sub-category nested after each other. In in the example you mentioned, you'd see something like this (I'm making up other sub-categories to illustrate): 
   v Travel
        airfare      
        hotel
        meals

   v Work
        Supplies
        Travel
           meals

If you are doing some other report where Category is a column, you'll want to to to Quicken Preferences > Register and click the option to display category "long names":



This will make categories show "Work:Travel:meals" in both registers and reports.

Dr_B said:

Also, is there any way to embed multiple groupings of reports. In QM2007 I could easily specify columns as time intervals (say monthly or annual for P/L statements) and subtotal the categories at the subcategory or class level.

Yes and no. You can do this for some, but not all, permutations of rows and columns. 

For instance, let's say you want to show a report with columns which are months or years, and where the rows are categories and subcategories. There are many pre-built reports you can use; in this case, you could select Summary > Category Summary by Month or Summary > Category Summary by Year. But to be more flexible, you can just click on the New button on the Reports screen. First, you select the basic type of report you're creating: Transaction (show all transactions), Summary (show totals for each sub-cateogy, or Comparison (for comparing two time periods. So for a P&L, you'd select Summary. This brings up a screen where you can define your rows and columns:



If you want rows to be categories and columns to be months, select Row=Category, Column=Time, Time Interval=Month.

If you want rows to be categories and columns to be years, select Row=Category, Column=Time, Time Interval=Year.

If you want rows to be tags (what used to be called Classes in Quicken 2007) and columns to be months, select Row=Tag, Column=Time, Time Interval=Month.

And so on…

If you want a report which can't be represented by these choices of rows and columns, you may be out of luck. (Give an example, if you have one, and we can think about if there's a way to do it.)

After you set these parameters, click on Continue to Customize, where the first thing you'l want to set is the date range. If you're doing a category report by months, you might want a date range or This Year, Last Year, or any arbitrary month starting and ending range. If you you're doing a category report by year, you'd want January 1 of the first year and December 31 of the last year you want in your report (e.g. 1/1/2016 to 12/31/2021).

This is pretty flexible, but it doesn't allow you to do something like specifying a report for the first quarter of each of the past 5 years. For that, you could to do a report with a time interval of quarter and a time range of the past 5 years, export it to a spreadsheet, and delete the columns for the second through fourth quarters of year of the 5 years.

You also can't specify multiple subtotal groupings. For instance, if you wanted a report by categories, and within each category you wanted subtotals by Tag, there's no way to do that. You can do a report with Row=Category and Column=Tag for whatever date range you want, which accomplishes the basic goal. But if you want to do this for each of the past 5 years, you'll have to set up a report and export to a spreadsheet to build the specific details you're looking for. 

Dr_B said:

I have 20+ years of tax reporting procedures based on the earlier version(s) of Quicken and it appears to be too difficult to reproduce its functionality.

I'll say two things. First, the reporting in Quicken Mac has been getting better year by year as the developers continue to add new functionality, but it's still not as flexible as some of the reporting options in Quicken 2007. Second, I'd encourage you not to focus on how you've done it for 20+ years, because trying to compare fine point by fine point between the old and current program can be an exercise in frustration; instead, focus on what you need to do with your data from Quicken. This includes reflecting on whether you need everything in the report you're used to; sometimes examining what data you need and what you're doing with it, with a fresh eye unencumbered by the past, can yield ways to streamline, simplify, or substitute something slightly different. In some cases, it may entail exporting data to a spreadsheet, but unless these are reports you run very frequently, that may not prove to be to be too much of a problem.

Finally, you mention tax reporting, and I should note that the Tax Schedule report in modern Quicken Mac is a bit different of a beast than the transaction, summary ad comparison reports. It knows how to extract certain data, particularly with investments, and put it in the right place; however, it's an old report (a carry-over from the 2010-era Quicken Essentials, the code from which the current Quicken Mac was built) which hasn't yet gotten a make-over to use the new reports engine the developers built a few years ago. So it's less configurable in some ways, and you may need to output the entire report even if you're only looking for one chunk of the data it compiles — but it is a useful report for tax purposes.

I hope this helps. Please post back if you have things you can't figure out how to do with reports. 

DrB

thank you for the very helpful advice. It is much appreciated.
Regarding tax reporting - I have to file taxes both in Australia and the USA. I have set up a work flow that allows me to quickly export a QM2007 report to an xls file and then I apply exchange rates from a file that I have compiled over the decades (daily midpt data). I find it easier to just output report data typically as categories sub-totalled by account and then manipulate the data in Excel so that I can apply the relevant forex rates for the tax office in question. I'm 65 and I'm not interested in learning a new way to do the same old thing to be honest. That said, I think your advice will help me get much of the information into a format I can use relatively easily. I haven't had much use for the IRS tax classifications in the past because my situation is not particularly complex.

Next question: Is there a way to globally change a category (or any other field text for that matter)? In this case I wish to add a subcategory to a bunch of transactions that have the same incorrect category specification. In SQL it would look something like
set category to 'mynewcat:subcat' where (payee contains "UCOP" and category = 'oldcategory'). Basically, a slightly nuanced change all command. I haven't been able to find a find/change command in Q2022.

Could this be done by exporting the relevant transactions, editing them in a text editor and reimporting them? I have a feeling this would just duplicate the old transactions with the new categories and then I'd have to manually delete the old ones transaction by transaction which would probably be more work than editing the original transactions. It's a computer - I shouldn't have to click 3 or 4 times per transaction. (Is there some way to make all split information show by default in the transaction register so I don't have to keep clicking to drill into the transaction every time?). Surely there is a way to automate the process?

lhossus

DrB said:

...
Next question: Is there a way to globally change a category (or any other field text for that matter)? In this case I wish to add a subcategory to a bunch of transactions that have the same incorrect category specification. In SQL it would look something like
set category to 'mynewcat:subcat' where (payee contains "UCOP" and category = 'oldcategory'). Basically, a slightly nuanced change all command. I haven't been able to find a find/change command in Q2022.

Underlying Quicken for Mac is an SQLite database. It can be inspected by many of the available SQLite applications found on the Web.

jacobs

DrB said:

I'm 65 and I'm not interested in learning a new way to do the same old thing to be honest.

I hear you. Unfortunately, that's not the way computers and software work; things are always changing, mostly — but not always — for the better. We have to adapt or we get left behind. 

DrB said:

Next question: Is there a way to globally change a category (or any other field text for that matter)? In this case I wish to add a subcategory to a bunch of transactions that have the same incorrect category specification.

Maybe. You can select multiple transactions and mass-edit any field, including Category. Are the transactions you want to change all the transactions which use this category? Then you can use Search to find all transactions with that category; select all, do Transactions > Edit Transaction, enter the category name you want (category:subcategory), and press OK.

Or do you want to change some transactions which use this category and leave some unchanged? In that case, you'll need to find the ones you want to change and Command-click each one to select them, do Transactions > Edit Transaction, enter the category name you want (category:subcategory), and press OK.

In your example above, search for the Payee and select all, or if it's only some of the transactions for that Payee, then sort by category and Shift-click to select the ones with the category you want to change.

And there's a caveat. This only works with on transactions without splits. If you want to edit the category which which appears in split transactions, the mass edit doesn't work; you have to edit those one at a time.  

DrB said:

Could this be done by exporting the relevant transactions, editing them in a text editor and reimporting them?

No. Or not easily. Even if you massage the transactions into a format where you could import them, if these were downloaded transactions, they either won't import (because the FITID numbers already exist in your database) or would duplicate them (if you wiped out the FITID numbers on the existing transactions.)