search on reconciliation window in Mac Quicken

mrooney

Hi,

When I reconcile an account with a lot of transactions it would be very useful and more efficient to have a search function on the reconciliation window in Mac Quicken. Now, during a reconciliation, if I cannot find the transaction quickly, I have to go back to the main Quicken window to use the search function to find it or find it is not there.

It would be far more efficient to have the search function also on the reconciliation window to search through the period that is being reconciled. Then, only the germane transactions for the reconciliation would show up rather than all transactions with the same amount in the database.

Regards,

..michael..

jacobs

When I do reconciliations, comparing to a bank statement or credit card statement, I generally want transactions in date order (which is the default) to match the financial institution statement. But you can also change the sort order to any of the other columns. So if you want to mark off all the checks, you can click the Check # column heading to sort them in order. If you’re looking for a transaction with a specific amount, or all deposits, you can click on the Payment or Deposit column to sort the transactions in amount order, ascending or descending. I don’t know if that’s of any help; in my experience with these options, I’ve never found I needed a text search as well. (But I’m not saying I’d object if they added it.)

mrooney

I have been thinking about what you said about how you do reconciliations and how I do them..

Yes, I generally want transactions in date order too. Yes, I can change the sort order to other columns, but I really almost never want to do that. Oddly perhaps, I almost never write checks anymore. Almost everything is done via ACH or Venmo and a diminishing amount via PayPal. Venmo is increasingly popular.

Text searching is far easier and faster for the user than putting a column in order and then scrolling for it. Quicken has the code for searching so reusing it on the reconcile screen should be pretty straightforward.

Btw, I have found a trick with searching you might take advantage of. Type your search string somewhere else and then copy it and paste it into Quicken. With a big Quicken data file, the search mechanism frequently will not take my next character for the search until it is done searching for whatever it has already been searching for. Pasting in a search term cuts the waiting time a lot, down to only one search. Of course Quicken could delay its start a search until the whole search term was finished being typed in. They have not done that yet though.

jacobs

@mrooney The Quicken Mac developers have played with various timing configurations for Search over the years. Currently, if you type quickly, you can type as much as you want before the program executes the Search. But if you're slow, then it will execute the search after the second character. That's why your trick of pasting in a search term works; it's the equivalent of typing very quickly. (I suspect the developers don't do their testing using large data files, and therefore don't typically see the Search delays we end users do.)

mrooney

As you, I have used Quicken for many years and know they have played with timing. I was not trying to go back into the past. My comment or request is based on the current timing settings. I do type fairly quickly as I am a touch typer. What I have found is Quicken searching before I am done typing even for short strings.

It is usually a waste of time for Quicken to search before I have finished typing my complete string. There have been odd exceptions when the beginning of the string I was searching for was unique enough to narrow the number of possibilities down far enough to get me what I was looking for.

mrooney

Actually, the best work around I have found is to type the search string elsewhere and then copy and paste it into Quicken.