Credit Card account is showing black negative numbers in the Register (Q Mac)

dp251242

I have one credit card account that shows negative balances in black with a negative sign. All other credit cards or anything else show neg balance in red. What gives?

jacobs

@dp251242

The same thing (gray, italic balance values) happens if your register is not sorted in ascending or descending date order. Look at your column headings and you'll probably see that something other than date is in blue with the blue line at the top and the caret symbol. Just click on the Date heading to sort the register by date.

dan.greenberg.ct

Right click on the account, pick Account Settings and make sure that you have Type set as Credit Card.

dp251242

To be clear, I have 6 credit card accounts all of them the setting for 'Type' is 'Credit Card'. In one and only one the register the negative balance numbers a black negative numbers. In the sidebar the balance is red and if you 'Show Inspector' on an item in the register the 'Balance' and 'Amount' are both shown in red. Only in the register for this one account are in black negative numbers.

RickO

Interesting. Could you post some screenshots, redacting any private information?

I don't think this would affect it, but just for grins, can you confirm the account is in currency US Dollars?

Also, in macOS System Settings > General > Language & Region, what Region and number format is set?

Finally, are there any filters set at the top of the register?

jacobs

@dp251242 When you say the balance numbers are black, are they solid black, or gray and italicized? (see my screen shot below.) As @RickO was getting at in his response above, there are some filter settings which will change the balance column to gray, italic values. For instance, if the second filter is changed from "Any Type" to "Spending", that will change the balance column to gray, italic values.

(And those Balance values when the register is filtered for Spending are nonsensical numbers anyway — the sum of all spending in the account since the beginning of time, I believe. I always thought it would have been better had the developers chosen to blank or gray out the balance column any time the balance is undefined due to filter settings.)

dp251242

Currency is US Dollar

Region is United States

Number format is 1,234,567.89

Note: The screen shots are not of the same exact transaction but are all in the same account.

Inspector.jpg

Register.jpg

Sidebar.jpg

jacobs

@dp251242 Yes, that is exactly what I showed in my screenshot above. Look at the second filter, and see if it shows "Spending"; if so, change it back to "Any Type", or click the green Clear Filters button.

dp251242

The filters are 'All Dates Any Type Any Status'

You are correct in that they are gray Italics (I should have stated that to be accurate). The balances are correct.

I don't think this has been going on for very long, I noticed it right away when I downloaded recent activity today. I am pretty meticulous about the way my accounts look because anomalies can sometimes indicate a problem.

jacobs

@dp251242

The same thing (gray, italic balance values) happens if your register is not sorted in ascending or descending date order. Look at your column headings and you'll probably see that something other than date is in blue with the blue line at the top and the caret symbol. Just click on the Date heading to sort the register by date.

dp251242

Thanks guys! The date sort was the problem. I don't know what is was before because the transactions were in the correct order for my activity. At the very least I learned something with your help.

I just dbl checked and the screen shot of the register was in the correct date order and when I went to the account there was no sort arrow at all but they were indeed in the correct order. When I changed the sort the balance turned red. Very weird!!

jacobs

@dp251242 Two things…

(1) It's easy to accidentally click on a column heading without meaning to or realizing it. So checking that you are sorted in date order is always a good first step if something looks amiss. And don't look at the dates in the register, look at the heading to see if Date is the sort column. (I'll illustrate why in a second.) It should look like this:

The column selected for sorting (a) shows the text in blue, (b) has the blue bar at the top, and (c) shows an up or down sort arrow.

(2) I'm sure that you were actually sorted by another column which didn't change the apparent sort order of the transactions you were looking at. For instance, here's an account with manually-entered transactions. if I click on the Status column heading (the • column usually at the left), and all my most recent transactions have the same Status — int his case blank — then the order of the transactions at the top of the register won't change, but the sort order is nonetheless changed, and thus the Balance column displays as it did for you. For instance, here I am sorted by Date…

…and here I am sorted by Status…

Because all those transactions in this case have no status symbol, the sort order didn't change for these recent transactions. Within each status, the dates are in order, so it can look like it's in date order.

To illustrate this, let let me choose a different account where the most recent transactions have different statuses. Here, I've sorted in Date order…

Notice that the fourth and sixth transactions have a different status icon. When I sort by by Status…

…notice that while the dates all appear in order, it's only the ones with the blue dot (downloaded) status which appear at the top of the register; the ones which have the pencil (downloaded and matched to a manual transaction) status — the fourth one dated 3/13 and sixth one dated 3/11 — are not present in the screenshot when sorted by Status; they're now way down in my register below all my blue dot (downloaded) transactions. But within all the blue dot transactions, they are in date order, so it can look like the register is sorted in date order when it actually isn't.

Hopefully that helped clarify and didn't confuse you! 😉