Dashboard Quicken Mac

lawdawging

I do like the Dashboard feature but I find myself not using it because I have multiple accounts I keep up with and many of them are not relevant to my dashboard. For example, I maintain my fathers checking account, because he's to old to do so, my savings account or a small home business that I don't need associated with the dashboard. I'm trying to get a true personal spending and income from my income and expenses only. I can run reports manually to achieve this but it would be nice to choose the accounts to associate with the dashboard. I could hide them to achieve this but again I have to unhide them to use all the accounts active. Love to see this in a future upgrade.

jacobs

@lawdawging You're certainly not alone in wanting to be able to customize the Dashboard cards in some way. I'd encourage you to visit the Idea post for customizing the Dashboard; add your vote in the yellow box under the first post, and add your comment from above about why the current Dashboard doesn't work for you without customization. 

Now, let's dig into some of the things you mentioned...

lawdawging said:

I maintain my fathers checking account, because he's to old to do so

For something like this which is not part of your personal finances, I'd encourage you to keep these records in a separate Quicken data file. It's quite easy to switch between two or three data files, and then you don't need every aspect of the program to be able to filter out an account like this. Alternatively, mark this account as Separate, so it's not included in reports by default; it will also be excluded from the Dashboard cards. 

lawdawging said:

...my savings account or a small home business that I don't need associated with the dashboard.

I don't know the nature of your home business, but this is also something many people would maintain in a separate Quicken data file. But if you don't have separate credit cards or bank accounts for this business, then I understand why you have the data in your main data file. But I'd ask: isn't the income and expenses for this small business part of your personal finances? If you get $1,000 in income for this business, wouldn't you want this reflected in your total income for the period?

As for your savings account, if you're transferring money into or out of savings, it shouldn't be affecting cards like Income or Expense (transferring to/from savings is not income or expense) or Spending by Category (transfers aren't categorized, and should be excluded from this card). If you spend money directly from savings, or deposit income directly into this savings account, then it should be included in your personal finance snapshot, right? 

Just some thoughts in case they're helpful. 

That all said, I'd like to see customization of some of the Dashboard cards, too. For instance, I want to get my investment income, especially in retirement accounts, out of the Income & Expense card to get a true picture of my "operating" income and expenses. My understanding is that the developers aim too keep the Dashboard cards as quick looks at aspects of our finances, and they don't want to add tons of controls and preferences to make them too complicated, but hopefully there's some middle ground where they can add some things users can control to make the cards more useful to more people.

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