How am I supposed to trust this?

JeremyMG

I just pulled in my quicken from Windows into Quicken for Mac. It has years of data in it.

I have an account where it was missing data and forced me to go back and re-reconcile it. What a pain. I noticed during reconciling accounts that transactions are missing from the migration.

Also, is there anything that explains feature disparity? I pre-enter transactions for the month using the bill payer feature on Windows but the Mac doesn’t appear to let you pre-enter multiple like say anything due in the next 30 days.

This is making for a very frustrating experience.

JeremyMG

Ignore the missing account: total fat finger on my part. Still need to see if there is some kind of way to look at bill payer adjustments. I cannot seem to find anything for the mac.

Jon

Could you explain a little bit more about what you're looking for with scheduled transactions? I haven't had any problem setting up mine.

JeremyMG

On the PC Version, there is this ability^^^^. I for example do this for some every other week charges and so that when I look at my 'end of month' cash, I can see what my projections are with transactions prepared for what should be coming in.

On the Mac version, it only appears to show the next one and there is no option to auto-enter items for the next thirty days.

Additionally, when I pre-enter these and then download transactions I'm not given the option to match transactions like I am on the Windows version. These seem like two very different workflows.

Jon

It's true that the process of downloading transactions works differently on the Mac. There's no screen where you can review the downloaded transactions, they just get placed in the appropriate registers automatically (and hopefully matched up correctly, which they usually are for me) and flagged as newly downloaded transactions. You then review the registers that have new transactions & mark them as reviewed.

As for automatically marking scheduled transactions as paid, I don't think there's a way to do that. You can set how far into the future you want to see scheduled transactions by clicking on the little clock symbol in the upper right corner of the register; you can set it as far out as a year.

Chris_QPW

"Auto entering reminders" far in advance is what I would call "old school" and it one that I don't even think the Quicken Windows SuperUser do or recommend any more since the feature that allows you to show the reminders was put in. I know people do it, some as extreme as entering a whole year's worth of transactions, but I personally think it is a poor workflow. It might have been "needed" in the distant past, but with the new feature (new is a relative term the reminder in the register is probably a decade or more old), but the main problem with it is that it not flexible for when things change. On the other hand, automatic reminder entry is valuable for getting entries into the register just before the downloaded one so that they can be matched. For instance, it quite important for transfers, instead of having Quicken guess if a given deposit/withdraw set of transactions are in fact a transfer.

I don't know about Quicken Mac, but the main tool I use for "cashflow" in Quicken Windows is the projected balance graph where you can select which accounts are in it and it does project their balances into the future based on the reminders. How far into the future is set by the time period of the graph. The showing of reminders in the register is controlled the same way that @Jon pointed out for Quicken Mac a "clock icon", which in Quicken Windows is in the top right of the register. Showing reminders in a register does a good job of seeing what is coming ahead in that account, but the projected balances graph lets you do it on multiple accounts at the same time, and for maybe a different period of time. If you have a lot of reminders, then they might be filling up the register so you might use a shorter period there, and a longer one on the projected balances graph.

Note also that Quicken Windows has a mode of automatic transactions entered into the register and you are supposed to review them process very close to what Quicken Mac has, besides the "old school" one where the transactions go into a "Downloaded Transactions tab" at the bottom of the register and they are accepted into the register kind of mode.

Not sure why you Quicken Mac wouldn't have automatically matched your pre-entered transactions, but as I understand it, the way you do the manual matching in Quicken Mac is drag the pre-entered transaction onto the downloaded one.

jacobs

Adding two notes to @Jon's post above…

There's no screen where you can review the downloaded transactions, they just get placed in the appropriate registers automatically (and hopefully matched up correctly, which they usually are for me) and flagged as newly downloaded transactions. You then review the registers that have new transactions & mark them as reviewed.

Make sure you have the Status column visible in your registers. (It's usually the first column.) Downloaded transactions have a blue dot, or a blue pencil if they were auto-matched to a manually-entered transaction. So it's easy to skim your register to see what's been downloaded. After reviewing the downloaded transactions, you can Control-click on a transaction and select "Set Status of selected transaction to > Reviewed". That clears the blue dot/pencil, so you can easily see which transactions you haven't reviewed yet. Additionally:

• You can select multiple contiguous transactions: click the first one, then Shift-click the last one you want; then Control-click on any of the highlighted transactions and select "Set Status of selected transactions to > Reviewed".
• You can select multiple non-contiguous transactions: Command-click on each one you want; then Control-click on any of the highlighted transactions and select "Set Status of selected transactions to > Reviewed".
• You can clear all the downloaded transaction status indicators without even selecting them all: Control-click one transaction and select "Set Status of selected transaction to > Mark all downloaded transactions as reviewed".
• And if you accidentally clear a transaction or realize there's one you want to review later, you can Control-click the transaction and select "Set Status of selected transaction to > Not Reviewed".

Finally, you may want to check/change on preference setting. In the left sidebar, there are also blue dot status indicators indicating which accounts have downloads, so you don't have to open and check every account after a one step update. In Settings > Sidebar, the first sections controls the Account Activity Indicators: you can set the blue dot to be visible in accounts with newly downloaded transactions or with unreviewed transactions. If you're using the blue dot status indicators in account registers and marking them as reviewed, then you probably want the second radio button here; it will display a blue dot for accounts which have one or more unreviewed transactions until you mark those transactions as reviewed.

As for automatically marking scheduled transactions as paid, I don't think there's a way to do that.

Actually, there is. When you create a scheduled transaction, it defaults to Mark as Paid > I'll do it myself, meaning it stays scheduled until you click on the transaction and mark it as paid/deposited. But you can change that setting:

The other options here are to Mark as Paid > Automatically, which will mark the transaction as paid on the transaction date, or Mark as Paid > Before scheduled date, which allows you to set the transaction to be marked as paid as many days prior to the transaction date as you wish:

JeremyMG

I’ll have to poke around. Here is roughly what I do:

I have Quicken enter all of my expected incomes and expenses in. I then can look at the end of the month to see about how much free cash I will have to work with. I then every week pull in transactions/match up/etc. so if I had $500 in free cash after all of my expected expenses, and I spend $100 on something, I’ll see I have $400 to work with to the end of the month. I’ve been doing this for years, this let’s me just watch my monthly number and not fuss over per-week totals. I run some pad so I can do this and watch from a monthly view, not a every paycheck view.

Chris_QPW

I have Quicken enter all of my expected incomes and expenses in.

Do these expenses occur with any kind of schedule?

If so, you can setup them up all as reminders, and then setup to show the reminders in the register for 30 days, and then you will be able to see the same information by looking at what the balance is at the end of the month.