Need to search for an EXACT amount (i.e., 2.99 but not 12.99 in the search results)

tntgalx10

Recently switched to mac from windows, and using Quicken Mac now. Starting to come undone at the annoyances and missing features…

How can I perform a search for an EXACT amount? For instance, search for 2.99 and not have transactions for 12.99 and 32.99 show up in the results? Please do NOT tell me "oh just sort the results by amount!" because that is NOT a solution when 1) you have a Quicken file that dates back to the year 1998 and thousands of transactions, and 2) you need to sort by date (sorting by date is useless when not just 2.99 transactions are in the search results, but also 12.99, 32.99, both debits and credits numbers!)

If this is indeed somehow impossible (google seems to think it is…), then how can I run a report for an EXACT amount, as a work around?

Searching with the amount in quotes does not work. Searching for the amount with a negative or positive symbol as the first character does not result in exact amount results either. AHHHHH!!!!

It's insane to pay a lot of $ for annual subscriptions, and have very well documented issues (I am not the only one needing this feature!), and yet only see prior discussions be "closed" with zero resolution or fix… for years and years! C'mon….

jacobs

@tntgalx10 First, I understand your frustration. Second, you are talking here to a community of fellow Quicken users, along with a handful of Quicken moderators who keep things organized and help answer some basic questions; you're not speaking with management, nor the development team.

The only way we can try to get points across to management is with "Idea" posts in the Product Ideas section of this forum. And it turns out, there is an existing Idea thread seeking complex search functionality — not only exact amounts, but greater/less than, and AND/OR/NOT-type searches. I suggest you take 10 seconds to add your vote to this Idea topic (click the little dark gray arrow in the yellow box under the first port to register your vote), and also copy and paste your post above into that thread. More votes can help push a feature request up the developers' priority list. More comments make the post more visible at the top of the forum, which can help draw more votes and comments. I think it's useful, for instance to mention that not only do we want to be able to Search for an exact amount, but we want to be able to generate a Report using the same criterion.

The problem we users face is that the developers have more than 600 Ideas posts requesting new/enhanced capabilities, and the small development team only has the capacity to tackle a few projects at a time. The good thing is that if you look back at where Quicken Mac was five years ago, you can see definite positive progress; the bad thing is that we're never satisfied because they can't possibly address all the things we'd like them to. And as users, we all have different views on what should be The Top Priority or what should be the Top 10 Priorities; what's obvious and crucial for you may be something I don't really need or care much about, and visa versa. So the developers have to sort through the mountain of requests and pick and choose what gets done this year, next year, and beyond.

Back to the issue at hand… I know you don't find this acceptable, but it's the best I think we can do for now:

1. First constrain your search by selecting the account or account group you want to search within. For instance, don't select All Transactions in the sidebar if you know it's a check you're searching for. That will cut out a lot of extraneous transactions.
2. Next, search for the amount (e.g. 2.99). Yes, this will bring up extraneous transactions like 12.99 and 122.99, but your needle is in that haystack.
3. Now click the Amount coup to sort the Search results in numerical order.

My Quicken data file dates to the early 1990s and has nearly 70,000 transactions. When I search for 2.99 across All Transactions, I get 134 transactions, and sorting by Amount makes it take just a couple seconds to find the 20 of them that are exactly 2.99. If I had limited my search to a specific account (checking) or type of account (credit cards), as my first step suggested the results would have been even narrower. Is this the optimal way to find a transaction? No. Of course, it would be better if you could search =2.99 or "2.99" and get the result in one step instead of 2 or 3. But you can get to the desired result, and it doesn't take terribly long to do so as a workaround. And hopefully at some point, the developers will deliver expanded Search and report criteria capabilities.

Steve Taff

Small point:

Enter -2.99 (with a minus sign) returns ONLY expenditures of that exact amount. Enter +2.99 (or 2.99) returns all expenditures ending in that amount, as above.

So if it's an expenditure that you seek, Quicken has you covered. Otherwise, nope