More Significant Dashboard Challenges / Problems
I was looking at the Home / Investment Views and noticed a number of errors / problems.
i) Return Card
The below image shows the YTD Investment Return for some of my accounts which include both CAD and USD accounts.
The card results did not look correct to me. The first / main reason was that the rightmost account titled "USD" holds only one security which is up over 18%.
ii) "Show Full Graph"
The above noted issue / problem resulted in my pressing "Show Full Graph" which resulted in the below image:
iii) The problems:
a) The most obvious problem is how / why does the rightmost account show a loss in the Card but an 18%+ return in the "Show Full Graph". Someone has made a serious math error?
b) The CAD returns in the two images match but the USD returns in the two images do not match. With a little more digging I determined that Card returns include the F/X gains / losses (which are approximate an additional gain of 2.6%) whereas the Show Full Graph returns exclude the F/X gains / losses. This explains why the Card Total IRR is > 10% while the Show Full Graph Total IRR is < 10%.
Why would Quicken code these to be different / inconsistent (i.e., both the Card and the Show Full Graph should consistently exclude / include the F/X gains / losses).
Worth noting and what would be even better, would be the option to exclude / include F?X gains / losses.
c) This one is a small nit but I thought I would add it for completeness. There are two accounts which have zero balances and which do not appear in the images. When I press "Show Full Graph" the report shows an error message claiming the Total IRR is above / below 1000%. Why can Quicken not be smart enough to avoid said message when an account has zero balance and simply exclude it.
THE CONCLUSION: The dashboards are visually great and wonderful idea as they provide a very powerful analysis and view of the information (i.e., I fully support their development and use). That said, they are useless unless and until they are fixed and they can be relied upon. As a clear and obvious example look at the USD account, the difference between a -3.5% return and an 18.5% return is meaningful and renders the dashboard unreliable and useless (i.e., before digging in I had no idea whether the returns for the other accounts did / did not make sense).
THE ASK: There are so many similar inconsistencies and math problems with the dashboards can someone at Quicken make a decision that to fix these problems so that the dashboards can be relied on (this is, after all, a financial reporting package and needs to be accurate)?
A POINT: There are those here who know that I have "raised my voice" that the dashboards are not sufficiently configurable. This is a different, much lesser and much more important ask; I am asking that the math be consistent, correct and reliable!
Thank you.
Comments
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Quick update.
I spoke to Quicken support about this.
I was told that this is a bug and it has been passed to engineering to engineering to be fixed.
It will be interesting to see their fix / response time as I now have confirmation that four bugs are with engineering. Let's see how long they take to fix.
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Collectively, the numerous bugs and transaction download issues that are presently in play are absolutely exhausting for users. I'm seeing stuff that I don't even have the energy to document. For example, earlier this week, I ran a report of spending by category. I used the "clear all" button to unselect all categories and then selected a single category for my report. So, I was expecting my report to contain a single category. To my surprise, the report contained two categories: one was the intended category and the other was an extraneous category that was completely unrelated to the category of interest. And get this… it got worse… the extraneous one is a real category but that real category is missing from the list of categories used to configure the report. So, I couldn't even manually remove the extraneous category. And, while looking for the extraneous category, which I never found in the poorly presented list, I found that the Clear All button did not actually clear all categories - it left various, seemingly random, categories checked. The workaround was to revert to the classical dialogue boxes for custom reports. Then I was able to generate the required report.
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@Arctic Hare I could not agree more. It is my view that Quicken really needs to focus on getting things to work.
In respect of the issue you noted above, I too have seen it. It is both frustrating and a problem.1
