Dashboard graphs on Mac are utterly useless

RickB_Mac

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.

jacobs

@RickB_Mac A few quick things to note:

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. 😀 People use Quicken in very different ways, and want to track different things. For example, while you think the Income & Expense graph "needs to show cash flow ONLY, not investment activity", someone who is retired an living off social security and their investment income might feel otherwise.

Next, the good news is that the Quicken Mac product manager said last year that customization of Dashboard cards were definitely planned and would be forthcoming. Now, exactly what we will and won't be able to customize is unknown until they release something, but a lot of people asked to be able to exclude investment income from the Income & Expense card — and they got that message. So, hopefully we'll see this within one of the next few releases. Dashboard cards didn't even exist in Quicken Mac until late 2022; the Income & Expense card wasn't added until February of last year, the Net Worth card was added in April, and the Bills & Income card was just added in September. Also new in September was the ability to hide & show cards now that there are more of them. To fully replace the old "Overview" page, they probably need some form of Dashboard budget card, so I wouldn't be surprised to see that sometime early this year. The point is: Dashboard cards were new in Quicken Mac, and over the past year the developers have been adding new feature and fixing bugs to make them more useful. Some degree of account customization, for some or all cards, has been promised for this year.

Your idea to be able to have multiple iterations of the same card is an interesting one I don't think I've seen before. I'd suggest you create a new Idea post for that. (At this point, it wouldn't make sense, but once they add customization of accounts or other parameters, it would.)

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.

Yes and no. The Business & Personal version adds a separate business Dashboard page, and there are separate Business Income& Expense and Business Bills & Income cards there. Business income and expenses are separated out because they require using categories designated as business income/expense categories.

Chris_QPW

I find this statement ironic:

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.

Because I know there have been requests on the Quicken Windows side to include the investment activity. Why?

Simple when people are in retirement and living off of their retirement savings, they consider this "income".

majorgear

Don’t for accounts like the Fidelity Cash Management account which is a brokerage account that can replace a traditional checking account. It works great for me.

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

jacobs

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.

RickB_Mac

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.

Chris_QPW

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.