Balance column disappeared

Ken Sutton

Version 6.8.1 (Build 608.44845.100) macOS 10.15.7 Balance column has disappeared. on checking account (in use since 2016). I check account every morning. Was fine yesterday. Is not in the list of available columns. Second account (recently created Credit Card) is fine.

RickO

This is most likely because you have selected the Cash group register in the sidebar instead of the checking account. If you only have one Cash account, the transactions in the Cash group register will only show that account and look just like your checking account but without the Balance column. 

You may have inadvertently collapsed the Cash group, thus hiding the name of your checking account. To expand it, hover over the Cash line and click the > symbol that appears. Or click the three dot (...) icon at the top of the sidebar, then Expand All Sidebar Groups. Once you click on the actual account in the sidebar, you should again see the Balance column. 

Chris_QPW

@RickO Doesn't Quicken Mac also hide the Balance column if the user sorts the register in a way that the running balance doesn't make any sense?

Chris_QPW

Never mind @RickO, I just read another Mac thread and it seems that the behavior now for that condition is to change the balance column to italics.

RickO

Chris_QPW said:

Never mind @RickO, I just read another Mac thread and it seems that the behavior now for that condition is to change the balance column to italics.

That's correct. In addition to italics, it also turns the text in the Balance column gray vs. black when a register is sorted by a column other than Date.

jacobs

The way the Balance column is handled when not sorted by date seems like a bad compromise the developers came up with. Originally in Quicken Mac, if you sorted by anything there than date, the Balance column became blanked out, to show that no balance is available when sorted by a columns such as Payee or Category. But users were calling Support saying their Balance column disappeared and not understanding why. So the developers decided to display values, but make them gray and italic. Does this explain things better to a user who doesn't understand their register isn't sorted by date? No. It's equally, if not more, confusing. So we get users who post in the forum who are understandably confused by the crazy values they're seeing. I don't understand the decision that showing nonsensical numbers in gray italic is less confusing to users than showing no numbers. Ideally, they would have grayed the column, with no numbers, and displayed a message within the column like "Running Balance available when sorted by Date" — but I'm sure the code they're using to display the table of transactions doesn't support doing that. 

RickO

The explanation I got when this was implemented was that (some) users wanted the balance to show because they use it to see the total of transactions when filtered and not sorted by date. Didn't make sense to me because you could always just select the transactions and see the total in the upper right corner.