Investments:Autofill Previous Date Used & Customize Holdings Order; Categories:Custom Display Order
1. Use previously entered date from Edit Price History> New form as default for next New form.
In an investment account, Holdings> [select a holding]> More> Edit Price History> New, the "New Price For [holding symbol]" form displays with the Date field defaulted to "today" (ie. 1/5/23). So far so good if I'm enter the holding's price as it is on 1/5/23. However, since I'm usually adding EOM prices from the EOM statement for my entire portfolio, I change the Date to the closing date of the statement (ie. 12/31/22) and add the new price for that holding.
I then move on to the next holding. When the "New Price For xxx" form opens up, the date has defaulted back to "today" (1/5/23), so I have to change it back to the statement closing date (12/31/22). It would be nice if, after a New price has been added, that the New form would remember the previous date that was used and then use it rather than "today" as the default date for the next New form. This would cut in half the number of fields on the New price form that need to be updated each time, and would lessen the possibility of entering an incorrect date because of a typo.
2. In an investment account, the user should be able to assign a holding to a user definable group (as categories can be), then be able to optionally utilize the groups as a sort key for displaying holdings on the Account Overview form (by group order, then alphabetically within the group) or everything alphabetically.
Investment statements group holdings in different ways and then list them alphabetically within these groups. Being able to mimic these same groupings and order when displayed on the Account Overview form would make data comparisons between the statement and Quicken easier since both would be in the same order.
3. There needs to be a way for the user to indicate which order categories consistantly display or print in. The default of alphabetical order is not always useful.
The best solution would be to have a new first column in Category List called Display Order. This column would be the column that the user selects for the order the categories are displayed in the Category List (ascending or descending). The user could arrange them using an enhanced "Rearrange Cats & Accts" tool (based on the existing Rearrange Accounts tool but with the addition of all the categories and an option to show hidden categories). Some restrictions should be imposed on what the user can do: Accounts can't be moved out of their Account Type (Banking, Investment, etc), child categories cannot be moved out from under their parent category (to move a child category outside of their parent category, the user would need to change the parent/child relationship by editing the category on the Category List form), moving a parent category moves all of its child categories. Then whatever display order the user has established becomes the order in which the accounts and categories are shown WHEREVER they are displayed or printed.
Another idea for ordering the display of categories would be to have some characters that can be used to prefix category or account names that all displays and reports of categories would recognize as sortable characters. This would enable a category to appear before or after the "normal" categories even though the display is technically in alphabetical order. I have played with this a little but have run into some quirks. An asterisk (ASCII 42) or minus (ASCII 45) will sort to the top of displays and reports (no problem). However, an underscore (ASCII 95), although it sorts to the bottom in Category List and transaction category drop downs, it sorts to the top in reports and Planning. The tilde (ASCII 126) sorts to the end in Category List, transaction category drop downs, and reports, but in the Planning display, even though it shows up at the end, its parent name (in lighter text) is prepended to the category name (yes, it's in the desired position, but it looks odd). Other ASCII characters that have higher values than upper and/or lower case letters, are rejected by Quicken).
[Edited Title for Clarity]
Comments
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- If entering prices for multiple securities for month-end or similar date, it is far easier to use a portfolio view that includes the Price/quote column. Set the As of date to the desired date (12/31/22) and work down the list of prices typing in the desired values for each security.
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2. The ability to group securities has been requested and discussed here
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> @q_lurker said:
> If entering prices for multiple securities for month-end or similar date, it is far easier to use a portfolio view that includes the Price/quote column. Set the As of date to the desired date (12/31/22) and work down the list of prices typing in the desired values for each security.
This works great! Saves quite a few steps. I no longer have to navigate to the "New price for xxx" form via Security Detail View> More> Price history> New and then close them all down to get back to the Account Overview screen.
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> @Jim_Harman said:
> 2. The ability to group securities has been requested and discussed here
Thanks for the insight. After reading Jim_Narman's included post, I had an epiphany. Buried in the "Edit Security Details" section is the "Asset Class" field that has 10 Custom classes that I presume I can edit to whatever I want to call them (I accidently stumbled upon a form to edit these classes but bailed out because I was looking for something else at the time). When the Asset Class dropdown displays, it only shows the top 7 rows of potential classes that, to me, look like industry standard classes (also, the Quicken documentation only explains the top 6 industry standard classes) so I have been using just those top 6. Somehow I have missed the big, fat "Customize" button to the right of the Asset Class dropdown. "Do!" - Homer Simpson -0 -
You should experiment with the custom asset classes before spending a lot of time setting them up. They are relatively new and there were issues with them initially. For example see this post
and here
Please let us know how they work for you!
There is also a customizable "Investing Goal" setting for each security, which you might find useful. You can use this as a filter and for subtotaling in the Investing > Portfolio views and some investing reports.
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