Dashboard graphs on Mac are utterly useless

Question

Is there some reason the Quicken for Mac product team won't provide the ability to customize the content of the Dashboards tiles, specifically Net Worth line graph, Spending pie chart, and Income &Expense bar graph?  The Income & Expense graph needs to show cash flow ONLY, not investment activity. It currently includes all activity from my investment accounts, effectively killing its usefulness as a cash flow tool. It's eye candy at best, a space filler.

Here's the frustrating point, Quicken for Windows has done this for years, and this is a basic tenet of cash flow accounting. I previously had to stop using the Windows version of Quicken because the database engine technology had become painfully slow with managing investment activity over the years of product "improvements". Q/Mac is ideal for my uses, except for the utterly useless Dashboard tiles, for which one simple feature would fix all of it.

Come on, Quicken Mac team, give the folks who actually know and want accounting principles some help out here. Can't you do like Quicken Windows and provide the ability to customize the content of the Dashboard tiles, i.e., with customizable accounts and categories?   If/when you do so, please allow adding multiple versions of the same tile, say Net Worth, so that a user could configure one to show just cash flow account value, and the other could show all investment value, for instance.

Now, you're just added Business functionality to create a new a Home & Business version of Quicken for Mac. I can only suspect this lack of ability to filter Dashboards becomes even more ludicrous for that type of user, given the lack of ability to filter accounts and/or categories.

Chris_QPW · Answer

I think the key sentence is:

I think it's always worth being aware that most features are not "utterly useless" to everyone, even though they may be "utterly useless" to you.

If even one person finds it useful than this statement is true.  Disappointing, but true.

@RickB_Mac I think you need to understand something, the way I see it, no one, including the developers think current Dashboard cards are idea.  They are just a start on a concept.

Even from the time they were released some functionality has been added to them.

But if one is to compare them to the "old Dashboard on Windows" there really isn't any comparison.  But that is true for Quicken Windows too (Quicken Windows has both the old and the new).

The way I see it, this is more of a question of resources and what should be done first.

RickB_Mac · Answer

I stand by my original remarks, the dashboard is fun eye-candy, but useless. Quicken Windows has been integrating account, category, and internal transfer filters for decades. I am in my working years. I need to see pure cash flow, without muddying that with investment accounts that are purely retirement. A bar graph showing cash flow Income & Expense, period. Further, another graph showing purely my retirement and investment accounts, things that are not part of my cash flow, should have their own chart. This would be useful to every Quicken user, whether living on retirement income only, a hybrid of the two, or just working paycheck to paycheck. None of this is a new concept in personal finance management. But when my cash flow shows a $3000 “expense” for investment management fees, purely contained within those investment accounts, this thoroughly destroys the cash flow graph as an Income/Expense view of cash and spending accounts. This should not be rocket science.

jacobs · Answer

Quicken for Mac excludes it from the dashboard cards like income and expenses since those cards only track “banking accounts.

That's incorrect. Non-investment income and expense transactions in investment accounts — e.g. those of Type=Payment/Deposit — are "banking" transactions, and are included in the Income & Expense Dashboard card.