what is the purpose/best way to use the reviewed column with the blue dots?

mikestone

long time quicken user, for better or worse, i just migrated my database from Windows to Mac and im like a fish out of water. i always reconcile my accounts to paper statement each month btw.

what is the idea behind the reviewed column ? i guess i am supposed to click it to confirm that i have looked at the transaction that was downloaded…but doesnt the green/blue check marks on CLR column make the reviewed column somewhat redundant?

jacobs

I think you are actually understanding it correctly. The blue dots are there for users who want to be able to review/edit/clean-up transactions, and keep track of which ones they have reviewed. This may include such things as choosing a better Payee name, changing the category, adding a memo about the purpose or contents of a purchase, or adding splits to a transaction. Note that you don't have to manually clear the blue dots one at a time; if you download transactions and get, say, 10 new transactions with blue dots, you can look them over, make any changes, and then clear the blue dots at once: select the 10 transactions, right-click and select Set Status of Selected Transactions to > Reviewed.

For Quicken Windows users who have previously had their downloads quarantined until reviews and accepted, Quicken Mac doesn't use that workflow. Transactions download directly into the account register, and the blue dots are used to denote them for those who want to then review and "accept" them.

But for someone who reconciles monthly with a bank account/credit card statement, you may not find it necessary to pay any attention to the blue dots if you're verifying all your transactions at the time you reconcile.

If you decide your workflow isn't going to include checking and clearing blue dots, there's a preference you can set (Settings > Register) for "Mark reconciled transactions as reviewed". This way, you'd just ignore the blue dots during the month, and when you complete your reconciliation, all the blue dots on reconciled transactions will disappear.

jacobs

I think you are actually understanding it correctly. The blue dots are there for users who want to be able to review/edit/clean-up transactions, and keep track of which ones they have reviewed. This may include such things as choosing a better Payee name, changing the category, adding a memo about the purpose or contents of a purchase, or adding splits to a transaction. Note that you don't have to manually clear the blue dots one at a time; if you download transactions and get, say, 10 new transactions with blue dots, you can look them over, make any changes, and then clear the blue dots at once: select the 10 transactions, right-click and select Set Status of Selected Transactions to > Reviewed.

For Quicken Windows users who have previously had their downloads quarantined until reviews and accepted, Quicken Mac doesn't use that workflow. Transactions download directly into the account register, and the blue dots are used to denote them for those who want to then review and "accept" them.

But for someone who reconciles monthly with a bank account/credit card statement, you may not find it necessary to pay any attention to the blue dots if you're verifying all your transactions at the time you reconcile.

If you decide your workflow isn't going to include checking and clearing blue dots, there's a preference you can set (Settings > Register) for "Mark reconciled transactions as reviewed". This way, you'd just ignore the blue dots during the month, and when you complete your reconciliation, all the blue dots on reconciled transactions will disappear.

mikestone

@jacobs thanks. your responses are very well worded and useful!

Chris_QPW

As someone that uses the "Automatically add to banking register" for transactions on Quicken Windows which is very similar to what Quicken Mac uses I think that there is a lot of misconceptions about this workflow by Quicken Windows users.

To me, "Review" and "Downloaded Transaction tab/Accept" are just different forms of the same functionality.

The basic concept is that you can't trust the download information/processing, and as such need a process to identify new transactions so that you can check that they are correct.

The "review" process does that in the register, the old Quicken Windows method does it in a "Downloaded Transactions tab".

Why do I feel that the "review process/in the register" is better?

Believe it or not the same people that insist that they would never use that process are the ones proving that is it inferior.

I see request after request for "We need this feature to work in the Downloaded Transactions tab". Over the years these have been, multiple select, size of the tab, sorting, accepting all the matched transactions, … And now with the adding of the pending transactions there is a new pending tab that is going to go through the same kind of requests.

In other words, they are requesting that these tabs have all the functionality that the register already has. So, if they get all their wishes they will have created four registers for every register. The main one, Downloaded Transactions, Bills and Income Reminders and now Pending Transactions.