Report showing accumulated unrealized gain

Question

I made a summery report: Row is category, column is time, interval is week.  Removed all accounts except investing accounts.  Removed all categories.  Went to Advanced and selected "Included unrealized gains" and hit go.

The report is basically what I wanted.  For each week, it shows what the unrealized gain did for that week -- up or down relative to the previous week.

Is there a way to get the accumulation of each week?  And then icing on the cake would be to graph it.

I realize I can export this and throw it into Numbers and get what I'm looking for but I'm wondering if Quicken has the ability.

jacobs · Answer

Well, I'd say Intuit took Quicken Mac through some good times and then almost completely ran it into the ground. A lot of people were pretty happy with the state of the Quicken 2007 era software, even though it lacked some of the features in Quicken Windows. Intuit made the right call to start from scratch when it became apparent that many of the technologies used in the legacy Quicken Mac would not survive for long in the Unix-powered Mac OS; then they didn't devote a large enough team to the task, fumbled the project multiple times, and nearly killed Quicken Mac in their multiple management shift in the late aughts and early teens. To Intuit's credit, they did eventually hire a small team to resurrect the Quicken Mac project, and although they didn't give them the resources to win big, they kept the flame alive. When Intuit dumped Quicken, the independent company hired a larger Mac team, and they made good, albeit slow, progress over the subsequent years. I think the current Quicken Mac is a pretty good program. It's not great because it's still missing too many features from both the legacy Mac program and its Windows sibling. But it's stable and reliable (I'm talking about the program itself, not the infrastructure for connectivity, which is swiss cheese) and slowly adding functionality.

In any case, Quicken has been independent of Intuit for more than six years, so I'd say it's time to get past your resentment towards Intuit. ;)  Intuit was responsible for the birth, near death, and resurrection of Quicken Mac, but the Quicken company has been on its own, charting its own course, creating its own fate for long enough now to let the Intuit stuff fade into the historical footnotes.

Perry Smith · Answer

Yea.  I've been a Quicken user since 1992 or so.  Before that I used a spreadsheet and before that I used an HP-48 calculator (I think that was the model).  I claim that the best Quicken was in 1994 before Intuit took it and gutted it.  I still have a lot of resentments towards Intuit.  They seem to think that Quicken on the Mac had no future despite the fact that Quicken, Quickbooks, MacInTax, and even Excel were first on Apple products.

jacobs · Answer

The far right column of the report is the total for the time range you've selected. But are you looking for a way to have a running balance after each column of the aggregate unrealized gains through that week? You can change the time period of the report to see the total change, but I can't think of a way to do that without building it in a spreadsheet. 

Nope, there's almost no graphing in the current Quicken Mac. I wouldn't be surprised to see graphing capabilities added as a future enhancement, but currently, almost all the reports are tables only.

Some quick background: in the prior generation Quicken Mac 2007 and earlier, there were graphing capabilities with the reports. When that software hit a termination point, then-owner Intuit set out to re-create a next generation Quicken product; after several missteps, what came out was a stripped down Quicken Essentials program in 2010. It included some limited graphing in some reports, but with no user-configurable controls. After several more fumbled years, Quicken Essentials was used to build the current generation of Quicken Mac starting in late 2014, and all the reports were just carry-overs from Essentials. Then around 2017, the development team unveiled an all-new reports engine which was more powerful, more versatile, more user-configurable. But that new reports engine did not include any graphing capabilities. Over the next few years, the developers added more reports and capabilities, but the absence of graphing continues to come up in user requests quite a bit. If I were to guess about where things may go in the future, I'd expect to see more robust investment reports get released next, and then some graphing capabilities get added — I think it's a matter of when, not if.