Budgeting-Transfers-Custom Category Groups Causes Category to Disappear in Budgeting Window

mtn_living

As of the latest software updates I am having some funky behavior in budgeting around transfers that I have assigned to a custom category called Asset Transfers. Here are the symptoms:

1. In budgeting windows, using Select Categories to Budget/Assign Category Groups I have created a category group called Asset Transfers.
2. In Asset Transfers group I have put 5-6 TO and FROM "transfers" categories, for instance TO Art and Collectibles to record purchases of art. Also use these categories for things like capital improvements to my home.
3. When I do my budget reports this nicely clusters all the transfers to/from into one group at top of report.
4. BUT - anything in that Asset Transfers custom group disappears from the budgeting grid and I can't budget the categories.
5. If I then drop a TO or FROM category from my custom Asset Transfers category group it re-appears in the budget grid and I can then budget it. That's my work around.
6. I should also note that in Manage Budget Categories/Select Categories to Budget my custom Asset Transfers group does appear and all my TO and FROM categories within that are selected.

Summary: why do transfer categories I assign to a custom category group fail to appear in the budgeting grid? I believe this is new behavior that appeared with the most recent couple of updates as I used to be able to budget these items no problem even within their own custom category group. Also, none of these categories are hidden categories.

I can get around this as noted by dropping the transfer categories out of my custom group but would like to not have to do that.

Quicken Premier Windows, latest revision, running on Windows 11 latest update.

Quicken Kristina

Hello @mtn_living,

When did the issue start happening?  Which version of Quicken were you using when the issue started? Was there anything that happened just before the issue started, such as a power surge, power outage, update, unexpected program or computer shutdown, etc?  Do you keep your Quicken file on your C drive or is it on a shared network drive?  Is your Quicken file synced with any cloud service, such as One Drive or Dropbox (if it is, you will usually see the service name listed in the file location)? 

The simplest way to check your file location, if you have Quicken up and the file open, is to click on File, then look near the bottom of the list, just above where it says Exit.  It will list the file locations for the 4 Quicken files you have most recently accessed, with the one you are currently in at the #1 spot.

Thank you.

mtn_living

Hi:

Thank you for the quick reply. Very very familiar with all the potential issues you suggest so should have mentioned*:

1. I always keep all Quicken stuff on C: drive and do not synch Quicken data to cloud drives of any type at all
2. I do not use any of Quicken’s cloud services so no synching to Quicken cloud either.
3. I do through Acronis backup make a daily back up of all of my data, not a synch, a real backup
4. I did experience a crash with Quicken with one of the newer version released recently (reported it). However I did a super validate on the data file and no errors detected.
5. I did a temporary restore of Quicken data file backed up a month or so ago when I know this issue was not present for me. The same issue appeared with that file, cannot budget transfer categories once they are added to a custom category group.
6. As best as I can tell this issue manifested sometime after one of the latest two Quicken for Windows updates.

This leads me to think the issue is software performance vs a data file issue. I realize this is a pretty obscure bit of function loss.

Thanks

‘* see my extensive involvement in hunting down and solving the disappearing budget 🐞

Quicken Kristina

Thank you for your reply,

Due to the nature of this issue, it is recommended that you contact Quicken Support directly for further assistance as they can walk you through troubleshooting steps in real-time and escalate the situation as needed.  The Quicken Support phone number can be found through this link here. Phone support is available from 5:00 am PT to 5:00 pm PT, Monday through Friday.

I apologize that I could not be of more assistance!

mtn_living

Thank you. I mostly posted here to see if anyone else has run into this obscure issue.

mshiggins

I can reproduce the problem - in both R50.16 and R52.20.

I thought the issue might have to do with mixing "income" and "expense" categories in the same user-defined Category group ... Quicken has had some difficulty with that in the past.

So I created two user-defined category groups for the transfers; then assigned all FROM categories to one group and all TO categories to the other group. I selected the transfers in both groups to a budget.

While that did cause the user-defined transfer groups to appear in the budget, it introduced a new problem: each group appeared twice: Two user-defined FROM groups and two user-defined TO groups.

Finally, I tried adding one non-transfer category to the single user-defined Transfer group (which contained both FROM and TO transfers). That caused the user-defined transfer group to appear (just once) in the budget.

Since it does not appear to be necessary that the non-transfer category have any budgeted or actual amounts, but just to be in the group; including an unused category in the user-defined transfer group might suffice for a work-around.


As to the underlying issue: Since it's an easy problem to reproduce, I suggest creating a New (test) Quicken file with the minimum contents necessary to display the problem. Then use Help > Report a problem to notify Quicken. Be sure to send the test file, and don't expect any response from Quicken. 

If Quicken decides not to "fix" the problem, perhaps they could at least document that user-defined category groups that consist only of transfer-categories will not appear in budgets.

-JP

mtn_living

Wow, excellent, thank you. I’m going to do what you suggest and create a demo of the problem. Good to know it isn’t my data.

Quicken Kristina

Hello All,

Thank you for taking the time to report this issue to the Community, although we apologize for any frustration or inconvenience experienced.

This issue is a bug that has been reported to our Development and Product teams for further investigation and resolution. Though we do not currently have an ETA, once a solution is created it will be made available as part of a future release.

Thank you!

(CTP-7828)

mtn_living

Thank you for the update.