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Some Transactions not included in spending charts with "This Month" filter [EDITED]

MountainRick

I have seen posts about not getting transactions from Chase. This post is about not including them in the "Spending by Category" charts, with the "This Month" filter. This issue started Dec 15th, 2023, after downloading transactions from Chase. The "This Month" filter on the Spending chart works for other bank accounts.

Quicken Classic Premier for Mac version 7.4.2 (Build 704.51578100) on MacOs 14.1.2.

Recreation steps:

Download transactions from Chase Visa.
Assign categories to the transactions as usual
Click the "Spending" tab for the Chase account, and note that transactions in some categories shown in the lower panel do not show up in the pie chart, giving you inaccurate summary totals for the month
Go to the Home tile and note that the "Spending by Category" tile behaves the same way.

Temporary work around:

Change the Filter to "This Quarter"
1. Note that the missing category appears
2. Select Missing category
3. Select the filter "This Month"

Presto! You have the data you need for a hot minute, until you navigate back to the parent category of "Spending" and your sub category disappears again.

I chatted the support desk - Their solution was to restore the backup from 12/14/2023 and wait for the Quicken support team to resolve the issue with Chase downloads.

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Comments

MountainRick

All the reports under the Reports menu work just fine. All data is included.

I created this post for those that use the "Spend by Category" tile and pie chart on the home page or the "Spending" pie chart on the account page.

When I open the Home page, one of the tiles is called "Spending by Category". This data is wrong when the "Month to Date" filter is selected. It is missing transactions from Chase. Screen shot attached.

When I click on the Chase account, and then click "Spending" I get a pie chart (screen shot attached) , and it does not include the transactions for Chase in the current month, when the "This Month" filter is selected.

jacobs

@MountainRick Okay, so just to be clear, you're talking about the Dashboard card and the account Spending pie chart, not a Report, right? The subject line on your original post is what's misleading.

It's hard to understand why one account is being omitted from the Dashboard card, since there is currently no way to select accounts to include in that card. Just checking: are all your accounts in the same currency? The Dashboard cards can't currently show data for accounts in currency other than your home currency.

Then I'm confused about the screen shot you posted above of the Chase Visa This Month pie chart. In this one, you've clicked on the Chase account in the left sidebar, and then clicked on the Spending tab, right? You say you get a pie chart, "and it does not include the transactions for Chase in the current month, when the "This Month" filter is selected." But the piece chart is showing data. This is what you see if there are no transactions for an account in the filtered time period:

But in your case, it's showing a pie chart with categories. So I'm confused about what's missing or wrong. Can you clarify?

MountainRick

If I could edit title I would drop the word "reports".

The two affected pie charts are: Dashboard card titled "Spending by Category" and the account Spending pie chart.

The problem is… the pie chart is missing some transactions when using the "This Month" filter

To make a simple example, I deleted all transactions in the quarter except 3 (1 transaction in Food, 1 in Utilities, 1 in Home). If you select the "This Month" filter, the pie chart is missing the transaction in the Home category, yet it is clearly in the list of transactions:

and if you select the "This Quarter" filter you get:

jacobs

@MountainRick Thanks for posting the clear example; very helpful. I'll try a few experiments tomorrow to see if I can replicate anything like this. (In the meantime, I was able to edit the original title to more accurately reflect what is being discussed here.) You might consider calling Quicken Support and showing the representative exactly what you've showed in these last two screenshots to see if they can explain it, fix it, or document it to report a bug.

I'm assuming the Amazon Marketplace transaction is an expense and not a credit/refund, right? If you change the date of the downloaded Amazon Marketplace transaction, does it show up then? If you enter a manual transaction to mirror the downloaded one, does that transaction show up in the graph?

MountainRick

@jacobs Thanks for fixing title. Nice thought on manual transaction, but.. Adding a manual transaction produced the same problem … No appearance in the pie chart with "This Month" filter, but appears using "This Quarter" filter. Also, my IM with support resulted in in "Please wait for the team to fix the issue with Chase bank.". Interesting that a manual transaction does not show either. Maybe not Chase bank specific?

@RickO I added the posted Date column == Exact match to the other Date column.

MountainRick

Thank you for all the ideas. It is not specific to Chase (if someone could drop the word Chase from title that would be great)

I isolated the problem to credit transaction. Quicken may call it a feature.

Real Problem: Inflow is not clickable in Spending Pie chart

To re-create, I reduced the number of transaction in December to just a few so this example would be simpler…

Pick any category that shows up in the "This Month" pie chart (e.g. Auto )
1. Auto: Service = - $75.93
2. Auto: Fuel = - $64.18
3. Auto: CarWash = - $20
Now add
1. Auto: CarPayment = $500 (a positive number that exceeds the expenses for the month)

⇒ The entire Auto category disappears from the pie chart and the total expenses, because it was turned into "Inflow = $339.89" (500-75.93-64.18-20). The Inflow of $339.89 is not clickable, so I could not open it to see my Auto expenses for the month. In my original post, I thought the expenses went missing because I knew I had expenses. I knew I had a credit, but didn't realize it would wipe out the sub category on the pie chart.

Check out this example. If I delete the fake food category, according to the pie chart I didn't spend anything in December (because the Parent category of Fuel is positive)

But if expand to "This Year", click Auto, then change the filter back to "This Month", you get the actual Auto expenses for the month, which is what I was looking for from the beginning.

jacobs

Ah, now I understand.

At first, I was thinking this was a product of some old code in the Income and Spending charts Here's the basic problem, I believe: these Income and Spending charts which use code carried over from the earliest version of the modern Quicken Mac(the 2010-era Quicken Essentials for Mac). Over time, the developers have updated and replaced a lot of that code, particularly in the area of reporting and budgets. In the parts of the old code which still exist in Quicken today, a negative expense is considered income, and a negative income is considered an expense. You can see this if you use the old Reports > Other Reports > Category Summary for the category and month you're talking about above. You'll see that your Auto category shows as Money In rather than Money Out with a positive balance. Of course, it doesn't make sense for categories to flop between income and expense based on their current balance, and the modern reports engine in Quicken Mac follows the category Type so that expenses with a credit balance will show as expenses with a credit balance, rather than income.

But after looking at this further, I don't think that's the issue here. I wasn't sure if some recent change to the code introduced this as a new bug, so I fired up an old copy of Quicken 2015 and tried to replicate your example — and it works identically. Here, I created a $200 expense to category Household, a $200 expense to category Lawn & Garden, and three transactions (one of which is a credit) to different subcategories of Auto. Just as you described, the Spending graph only shows the two categories with negative balances. The $25 net credit for the three Auto subcategories is listed as text, sort of like a non-clickable footnote:

Screen Shot 2023-12-20 at 8.05.10 PM.png

I was thinking of this as a bug, but it actually kind of makes sense. When the chart is a pie graph, there is no way to show a negative wedge in the graph! This pie chart accurately shows half my spending in each of the two categories. How would they reflect the negative of $25 for Auto in the graph? They can't! The only way to do this graphically would be to use a different type of graph, such as a bar graph, where values can go negative.

I'd also note that there isn't an issue between the This Month and This Year graph. In my example above, in a sample data file where I have no other transactions this year, the screens are identical for This Month and This Year.

The only part that I think is a bug, or just poor design, is that when there are no accounts with spending, but one or more accounts with credits, instead of displaying the message that "you have no transactions for the filter settings", I think it should just be blank where the pie chart would be, and show the Returns/Inflow text amount.

So if I move my expenses for Household and Lawn & Garden to November, the This Month chart shows:

Screen Shot 2023-12-20 at 8.11.49 PM.png

But I think it should show what I'm showing in this mock-up instead:

Since the use case for this is pretty narrow, I don't know if it's something the developers would consider fixing, especially if it involves old code which can't easily be update without re-writing. I'm going to submit it via Help > Report a Problem in the Quicken program, but I don't hold out much hope it will be addressed any time soon.

MountainRick

Thanks for taking the time to investigate and document. Hopefully when this happens to someone else, they will stumble on this post and realize what is happening. I think the Enhancement request would be to make the Inflow text a clickable link to drill down into the specifics. In your example above, you would click on Auto, and then Auto:Parking &Tolls and Auto: Fuel would show in a graph, and Mileage Reimbursements would show as the inflow.

jacobs

@MountainRick I did write up a report and submit it through Report a Problem, but since it's one way communication into a black hole, one never knows which of these things gets documented, or is already, or is deemed a low priority, or what. But at least it's been reported. Thanks for continuing to narrow your transactions to make it possible to zero in on exactly what is happening.

While making the Inflow category(ies) clickable to drill-down, I think it would need to be in the form of a report; I don't think it could be done in pie chart form because of the need to show a negative slice of pie! As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I think the better solution would be switching the pie chart to a bar chart, so the chart could reflect opposite/contra expenses or income. I'm guessing that with all the feature requests the developers have for the program, revamping the charts here probably wouldn't be high on their priority list — but one never knows! 😉