I would like to edit My Dashboard Top Categories Spending.

banittie

I'm Running on Mac Ventura, and my Quicken for Mac is 6.11.3. Loving the enhancements Quicken has been adding. Looking at my Dashboard, Quicken has the 'top spending' categories listed, how do I edit that list? AND how do I edit what goes into each of those categories? I ask, because I have a 'home' category that shows my home mortgage interest only... not even my mortgage principal (my mortgage category points to the mortgage loan, not the HOME category). And the one category 'OTHER' has 52 items in it, for almost 15% of my monthly spending... how can I get my Mortgage payment included to the home category on this list? And, I would like to CHANGE the food category to Food/Household... and move probably 20 things out of 'OTHER' and over to the food one. is any of this possible?

jacobs

Let's start with the fact that you can't edit the Dashboard card at all. It simply presents your top spending categories for the time period you've selected.

I have made the suggestion to the Quicken development team to increase the number of categories in the Spending by Category card — either a larger fixed number, or all categories greater than some percentage, like 5% or 3% of the total spending — but so far, they have apparently not agreed and made such a change.   I think their philosophy is that the Dashboard is intended to be a quick snapshot/overview of various aspects of your finances, and not to add too much detail that it presents an information overload users won't use.

Next, let's turn to your food category. If I understand correctly, you want to change your existing category "Food" to "Food/Household", and move some other current categories into "Food/Household". This is do-able. The edit the existing category name, go to Window > Categories, find "Food", double-click it to edit it, and rename it "Food/Household". Then find one or more of your other existing categories that you would like to now be part of Food/Household. Command-click each of them, along with Food/Household, so all are highlighted, and click the Merge Categories button at the bottom. In the resulting pop-up box, make sure you set the "Into" field to be "Food/Household", and the other categories will be merged into this one category. (Alternatively, you can drag existing categories over Food/Household, and Quicken will turn them into sub-categories of Food/Household.) (Also note that if you have exiting sub-categories of different main categories, you need to move them to all be under one main category, or to be main categories of their own, in order to merge them.)

Finally, you'd like to see your mortgage principal payment reflected in your spending categories. It's completely understandable, but isn't do-able. The reason is that the mortgage principal payments are transfers from your cash assets to reduce your loan liability; in accounting, this is just a funds transfer between accounts, but not an expense. And the Spending by Category card in the Dashboard is programmed to ignore transfers and only show expenses. If you want to see the principal payments reflected in a report on your spending, you will need to create a Report, or look at your Budget; in both of those places, you can customize the data to include the transfer to your own account.