Dashboard Income & Expenses

sb2010

Why doesn't the income bar count personal income payments to me for Social Security and Pension income? Without the the chart looks like i'm spending way too much.

jacobs

Ahhhhh… glad my shot in the dark landed! 😀I was really puzzled why it wasn't working for you, as it seemed you were doing everything right. Thanks for posting the screen shot which provided the clue we needed. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Jon

How are you categorizing those transactions? I'm not on SS yet but my pension payments show up on the Dashboard as Income.

sb2010

I have Social Security categorized as Personal Income:Paycheck and the pension as Personal Income. Both show up in the Overview, Net income tap when I click on a bar in the chart to see details , but not in the income & Expense chart on the Dashboard.

jacobs

Are the transactions for your receipt of Social Security deposits into a checking or savings account? There are no transfers involved, are there?

sb2010

Yes they are directly into checking accounts. No transfers involved.

sb2010

Each entry does include a split for tax witholding and medicare. ie. The Social Secuity has a split to show total check minus Medicare payment and tax withholding. Is the split making a difference?

jacobs

The split with the gross payment and the expenses deducted should be fine; the gross payment amount should track as incomne and the tax and Medicare deductions should track as expenses.

So to be sure we're on the same page, let's do an example. If your social security deposit is for $2,000 and there have been $400 taken our for Medicare and $600 taken out for tax withholding, you would have a deposit transaciton that looks like this:

These may not be the exact categories you use, but is this functionally the same as what you have?

Also, you've said the income from the deposit transaction is not showing up in the Income & Expense card; what about the withholdings? So if you click on the bar for any one month, it opens a transaction report showing your income and expenses by category. Are you saying the income is missing, but are the tax and Medicare withholding amounts present in the report, or are they missing as well?

sb2010

The tax and medicare are missing as well.

jacobs

Okay, so the entire deposit transactions are missing, it seems. That sounds very odd! There's something we're missing. Would it be possible for you to capture and share a screen shot of one of your deposit transactions with the splits, similar to my example above? You can black out the amounts if you wish.

Another thing you could try is manually creating a similar transaction, using dummy values but the same categories. Does this income and expense show up in your Income & Expense graph/report?

Jon

The account that these deposits are made to is not marked as a Separate account, is it? Transactions in Separate accounts won't show up in the dashboard.

sb2010

Here's the entry for Social Security and the Pension. Note that in my version of Quicken the decuctions are shown in a Payment Clr column instead of a negative number as shown in your example. No it is not a separate account.

Jon

And which version of Quicken would that be? If you're not using the current version, it would be helpful to say that up front.

jacobs

Note that in my version of Quicken the decuctions are shown in a Payment Clr column instead of a negative number as shown in your example. 

We're showing the same thing, actually. Your screenshots are of transacitons in the register which you have clicked on once to select them (and with the Quicken Setting to "Automatically show splits in register"). If you simply double-click your transactions to open them for editing, you'll have the same view I showed above. The splits editor, a holdover from some of the oldest code in Quicken Mac, does not have dseparate payment and deposit columns. (It's one of my beefs with the user interface that this has never been updated… but I digress! 😉).

So we're still not seeing why these transactions are missing from your Income & Expense graph. Let's try a few more things…

Are these transactions you entered manually, or were they downloaded?

Create a new report as follows:

• Reports > New > Transaction Report
• Continue to Customize
• Set the date range as Custom Dates: 3/15/23 to 3/15/23
• OK

Does this category report show the "SSA Treas" transaction under the three separate catagories of the split? I'm fishing to make sure there isn't something funky with the transaction date if this was a downloaded transaction.

sb2010

I'll create a a record tomorrow and let you know what happens, I do know that these are not downloaded transactions. They are ones I have set up and then scheduled them to repeat on the appropriate day each month. I have them set to automatically mark as paid on that date.

sb2010

I created entirely new tranactions duplicating the existing ones and they do show up in the Income & Expenses. (Test Pension below)

I also tried changing an existing entry to make sure the category was the same. It did not work.

I do not believe it is an issue with Scheduled Transactions — at least new ones. The two entries for Fidelity RMD above are scheduled transactions, but I created them in January this year.

When was the I&E module launched? End of 2022 or beginning of 2023? It appears to me that the tool is not pulling in items where the Schedule was created before the new module launch.. It is bringing in only new transactions since the launch. Do I have to recreate new transactions and schedules, since uodating an existing schedule does not work?

jacobs

I don't believe the transactions which were scheduled previously should be the source of the problem. A scheduled transaction is akin to a template which generates live transactions when posted (marked as Paid/Deposited). As soon as they are posted, I don't believe there's any difference between a transaction whcich was created by a schedule and one which was entered manually. And all the reports are generated on-the-fly in real-time, so something that changed two minutes ago will be accurately reflected in a Dashboard card or report.

Just checking: in your Income and Expense card, your date range is not set to "Quarter to Date", is it? All your transactions shown above have April dates, but your original MetLife Pension transaction is dated 3/31 — last quarter. It's a long shot, but… 😉

sb2010

That's it!!! It's not a long shot afterall. It was set to Quarter to Date. That must be the default, because I haven't changed it. Year to date report looks much better. Thanks for your help.

jacobs

Ahhhhh… glad my shot in the dark landed! 😀I was really puzzled why it wasn't working for you, as it seemed you were doing everything right. Thanks for posting the screen shot which provided the clue we needed. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!