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Auto calculation of split line

RMW

Let's say, I pay 150 at the market and get 50 back in cash. The downloaded transaction shows 150. So in the split transaction I manually calculate the 100 allocation for groceries and 50 for cash. In Quicken for Mac, I only enter 50 for cash in the 2nd split line and the top line for groceries is automatically adjusted to 100. So the total remains at 150. I seem unable to do that in Quicken for Windows. Is there a setting I am missing or is it a limitation in Q for W?

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Accepted answers

Chris_QPW

In that case, select the first amount (150) and then select the calculator and enter -50, Enter and then tab.

johnml

If the total is $150, split the transaction, enter the cash as $50 and quicken will put the difference on the next line, categorize it as groceries. Done! pretty elegant!!

All comments

Chris_QPW

Change the first line, not the second.

Example, the payee was automatically categorized as Groceries for $150 and now I select the split button:

I change the 150 to 100.

The last thing would be to just change the category for the second line.

RMW

That assumes I remember what the amount for groceries was. But I usually only remember the cash amount so I must manually subtract that amount from the total to get the groceries amount. To be able to enter the groceries amount in the top line, I would need to look that up in the receipt. If I kept it. Quicken Mac does that automatically, at least for a two line split. So my question remains: Can Quicken Windows do the auto calc for the first split line?

Chris_QPW

In that case, select the first amount (150) and then select the calculator and enter -50, Enter and then tab.

RMW

That works. Thanks.

But it is not as "elegant" and intuitive as Q for M.

Wish Q for W had the GUI of the Mac version combined with all the features of Q for W. Many of which are missing in Quicken for Mac. Which is why I am switching back to Quicken Windows. Their development $$$ should go towards improving data entry and GUI rather than a new logo…

johnml

If the total is $150, split the transaction, enter the cash as $50 and quicken will put the difference on the next line, categorize it as groceries. Done! pretty elegant!!

Chris_QPW

In reality, what to do when the user enters a value on a blank line in a given situation is a guess. If you entered 50 and the second line and then hit tab you will see that Quicken Windows is going to make its own guess at what you had intended. It is going to put in a third line with an offsetting value. And there are the buttons Allocate and Adjust, for different situations.

These might not seem like the "intuitive"/logical thing to do for your situation, but clearly, they make sense in other situations. For instance, if one just started with a split transaction and is entered all the amounts, which then make up the total.

I don't know why people get so hung up on the new logo. People act like that change took the Quicken developers weeks of development. In Quicken itself, it probably was less than an hour of work. Not changing the logo isn't going to get much of anything extra done, especially for a feature that they don't even know people want.

You are the first person I have ever seen mention this. How were the Quicken Windows developers supposed to know that this should be changed?

And how many of the other customers are willing to have your pet feature put in, before the features they want?

RMW

Not to go off topic too much but I would like to comment as follows:

I don't know how the QW and QM teams work together, or not. And, what the overall product strategy is for QW and QM. From my point of view, as a user who has worked with both platforms for several years, I can see that QW has features that QM does not have and vice versa. I started with QW over 10 years ago and have used QM for the past 5 years. Now I am back to QW and see that some or most of the entry screens look pretty much the same as they did 10 years ago. At the same time, Windows went from Windows 7 to Windows 11 with the latter more and more resembling Mac OS. My wish and hope is that the QW GUI will eventually follow that look and makes data entry as easy and intuitive as on the Mac. Meanwhile, I put up with dated and unattractive data entry screens because I am getting features and reports that are not (yet) available on QM. I just wonder who will get there first: QM with all the features and reports available on QW or QW with a Mac like GUI. There are other applications which run on both platforms with exactly the same GUI and features. So it is possible.

Chris_QPW

There are other applications which run on both platforms with exactly the same GUI and features. So it is possible.

Yes, it is possible, but not likely.

First off, to do so isn't easy. It is harder to develop for multiple platforms at the same time. Yes, if you are just starting out, and design it that way then you can do it and have it on multiple platforms. But if you already have two code bases, it is MUCH more work to get them to be multiple platform compatible. In a nutshell, you would have to totally rewrite the application for it. If at this point Quicken Inc wants to develop such a product, they would have to still maintain Quicken Mac, Quicken Windows, and take on a new full rewrite, for let's face it a product with a doubtful future where everything is going online.

Quicken Mac is "getting there", but still lacks features that were in Quicken Mac 2007, let alone even Quicken Windows Deluxe. Why is that?

Because in 2006 Intuit started a total rewrite of Quicken Mac and in 2010, they came out with Quicken Mac Essentials. It was called that, because it lacked so many features, they basically couldn't sell it and people just stayed on Quicken Mac 2007. And Intuit had to eat the loss of income. If it wasn't for Quicken Windows profit I'm sure they would have killed it off. They went off and on tried to improve it to a point they could kill off Quicken Mac 2007. All total I think it took until about 2015 before they finally could do that (had a product they could at least claim was good enough to stop supporting Quicken Mac 2007). I believe there was another major update (not total, but major) around that time too.

Maybe then that was the big mistake, right instead of writing a Mac only Intuit should have wrote something that was geared to multiple platforms. So, why didn't they? Well, I think the answer should be obvious. Quicken Mac 2007 users didn't adopt the "new Quicken Mac" until it was at least sort of close what they had. Now what would it take for a Quicken Windows user to accept Quicken Mac's feature set to a point where they could kill off "old Quicken Windows"?

People don't seem to understand that all those features take a very long time to develop. And if you keep going back and "update for the new GUI" something has to give. And it has to be something that people will pay for.

Now personally I dislike most of the "new have to have features" like Web/Mobile, Bill Pay, … not because they are bad ideas, but because they can't be implemented without lots of problems, especially in an old code base like Quicken Windows. But that is what the users are demanding, and Quicken Inc is trying to do what they want.

And yes, one of the customer requests is always "modernize". Well, here is something for you, I remember when they did exactly that to part of Quicken and the customers then complained "We didn't mean like Windows 10…" (which was the "modern" of that moment in time).

This whole discussion is about very obscure feature, Quicken is filled with these that people have got used to, not to mention all the large features. These come in by layering things over a very long period of time. But the "GUIs" seem to change daily in comparison.

RMW

Yes, complex issues indeed and thanks for elaborating.

Perhaps it takes the genius of a Steve Jobs to come out with products that people did not ask for, yet became very successful.

I agree with you that the new "have to have features" take away resources that could be used to rewrite Quicken Windows legacy code which would move the core functions of Quicken into a more state of the art look and feel. I also doubt that a real powerful personal financial application package could be implemented online. But how many users really need or want that. Maybe Quicken Inc has done the market research and concluded "not too many", hence not sufficient revenue compared to an online "essential" type application. Maybe people just want to see the daily or monthly colorful dashboard and be done with it.