Feedback on the potential new feature

Quicken Victoria

Hello Quicken Mac customers!

We are always monitoring the community forums, reading your comments and requests, and looking for ways to streamline and improve your workflow in Quicken. We’ve recently heard feedback that many users want to monitor specific transactions or set of transactions in their accounts, or across accounts, and have asked for a better way to find and organize these transactions.

We want to help! Please take a moment to describe how you have used Quicken to monitor specific sets of transactions and/or accounts. What works well, and what do you find lacking in the process? What are the criteria you have set to identify the transactions or accounts you are monitoring?

Thank you! Your feedback will help us better understand the problem, and design a solution that fits your needs. 

Quicken for Mac team

Austin@

I am also not sure why this is needed or would be more useful than other, more requested ideas. I can already monitor transactions and accounts on the dashboard, in the registers (with categories, payees, and tags, and memos) with reports, and with my budget. In fact, my preferred way of "monitoring" my transactions is by using the budget feature, which effectively monitors my transactions and helps me see where I stand in areas I have chosen. I would much prefer focus and development on building out more complete, robust budgeting features like those found in Quicken for Windows (rollovers, notes, custom category groups for use in budget, savings goals/envelopes to virtually "set aside" money, budget reports, etc.). To me, this is one of the areas where Quicken for Mac is most lacking.

jacobs

I agree with the two comments above: please, PLEASE focus on some of the many longstanding Idea topics which have a status of "Planned" or "Under Consideration" rather than fast-tracking some new feature I haven't even seen an Idea thread requesting.

Or perhaps we're not understanding what possible feature this might be describing. is this about something like tracking Amazon purchases?

Or does it encompass requests to be able to have more control over Searches? There are two areas I'd love to see Search capabilities improved:

1. An ability to have search results showing only the split lines which match a search term. Currently, Search results appear in a register, and display full transactions with where one split line might match the search criteria. As a result we can't see the matching items without manually opening each split transaction one at a time, and the total of the Search results is the total of the transactions and not total of the matching split lines. Example: I want to see how much I spent on bags of mulch this year. I Search for "mulch" in the Memo field, and the search results show every transaction which includes mulch. But if I made a purchase at Home Depot of $50 of mulch on one split line and $200 on a new tool on another split line, I want search results which only show the $50 of mulch, not the $250 Home Depot transaction.
2. An ability to enter more than one Search criterion with AND/OR/NOT operands. Example: Lawn & Garden (category) but NOT Home Depot (payee). Example: Amount is > $10 AND Amount is < $500. Example: Payee Home Depot OR Payee Lowe's.

Chris_QPW

Here is a clue, if that "feedback" couldn't properly describe what they wanted enough for Quicken Inc to understand what to implement, most likely it is a bad idea to try to pursue that idea.

And in truth just reading the description of this "idea" it sounds like an idea that either can't be implemented or in fact the people asking for it don't understand how to use Quicken, or maybe is already a request that is properly stated.

" monitor specific transactions or set of transactions in their accounts". I have seen requests for highlighting transactions in some kind of color, but that isn't really "monitoring" them. Unless someone is going to manually select transactions which doesn't sound like something that most people would do, you monitor your transactions based on the data that is already there. As in you have reports for Payee, Category, Tag, Account, … (and maybe in the future category groups). There is also that budgeting and debt reduction that kind of thing. You can't track "imaginary data" that doesn't exist.

If I was going to guess at what is really at the core of this "request/idea" it would be simply "Improve Quicken Mac's reports/graphing and other systems like budget and debit views". All things that are already voted up.

jacobs

@Quicken Victoria can you perhaps clarify or expand on what concerns the development team feels they have heard from users, or what possible new feature they are considering, as it seems unclear what this post is really asking about. Perhaps you were intentionally vague so as not to influence users' responses or to give away what you're contemplating — but I think it's a little too vague what you're asking about, as we're all having pretty different interpretations or guesses. Thanks.

Jon

I don't really get this either. Monitoring a transaction means to me that you're looking for something about that transaction to change, and the only change I can think of is when it clears at the bank. That's not something I personally need but I could understand if someone wanted an alert when a specific important transaction cleared. On an account level, an alert when the balance dropped below (or in the case of credit, rose above) a certain level could be useful, but again not something I'm personally looking for.

Quicken Victoria

Hello again Quicken Mac customers.

Thank you for the comments regarding our request for how you use Quicken to organize and monitor transactions. Apologies for the vagueness, which was intentional in the hopes of getting an unbiased idea of the problem, but seemed to just cause more confusion!

For clarity, this is what we are talking about: Creating and saving custom combinations of filters and search criteria, to monitor specific sets of transactions. Think Smart Folders or Smart Mailboxes on Mac — the concept would be Smart Registers, easily accessible from your sidebar, which would allow you to access these groups of transactions with one click, as opposed to performing the same set of search/filters every time.

We’re also considering adding additional filters, such as date range, amount range, multiple payee/category/tag values, match all/match any, and/or, etc.

To make sure we’re designing the right thing, it would be helpful to know:

• Would you find this feature useful?
• What filter criteria would you typically use (tags, categories, accounts, etc)?
• What additional filters would you suggest?
• In what situations would you use this feature? (for example: “I own several vacation rentals and need to track expenses and income for each property”)

Hopefully this helps shed some light on what we are asking and why! If it is still unclear, please let us know and we'll provide more details.

Thank you again for taking the time to help us better understand the problem, and design a solution that fits your needs.

Quicken for Mac team

jacobs

Thanks for the additional information, @Quicken Victoria; it's very helpful in understanding what you're looking for feedback on.

Creating and saving custom combinations of filters and search criteria, to monitor specific sets of transactions. Think Smart Folders or Smart Mailboxes on Mac — the concept would be Smart Registers, easily accessible from your sidebar, which would allow you to access these groups of transactions with one click, as opposed to performing the same set of search/filters every time.

It seems like a cool idea, and I can see some usefulness in this for some users, but it's not something I think I would use very often. I'm a little concerned how this might make a the sidebar more complex, with "smart registers" which would hopefully be kept separate and not be included in the "Total", and more preferences over what to display or not in the sidebar.

We’re also considering adding additional filters, such as date range, amount range, multiple payee/category/tag values, match all/match any, and/or, etc.

Any/all of this functionality would be much more useful to me than "smart registers".

As noted above in this thread, I'm concerned that this feature idea — which as best I can tell doesn't even exist as a request in the Product Ideas part of the forum — is being given consideration for development right now, when there are so many features which have languished on the wishlist for years. Just in the area of transactions and accounts, there are several feature requests with more than 100 votes, including "Improve Batch Editing to include changing split transactions" (239 votes), "Add 'QuickMath' functionality (from Quicken 2007)" (164 votes), and "Add Save a Copy/Year End Copy" (123 votes). In other areas of the program, we still can't produce a simple actual-versus-budget report, handle stock mergers/spin-offs while preserving cost basis, transact taxable IRA withdrawals (like RMDs and Roth conversions), track the cost basis of mutual funds which in the real world use average cost basis, create custom/savable investment reports, integrate accounts in different currencies, etc. — all of which have been requested for many years and have a large number of votes. I know some of these things are marked as "Planned", so hopefully we'll see them come to fruition before you dive into creating a feature like smart registers. Thanks, as always, for listening to our feedback!

Quicken Victoria

Hello! Thank you very much for your feedback! It looks like the advanced filtering options in the register are more important than creating Smart Registers. Following up on that, could you please complete a very short Survey and rank the proposed filters by level of importance? If there are other filters you would find useful but are missing, please add them to the list.

Please feel free to add any additional comments or questions you might have on this discussion board.

Thank you very much for your help!

Quicken Mac team

Link to the "Quicken Mac: Advanced filtering in Registers" survey - https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/9G8NT8P

jacobs

@Quicken Victoria I was happy to see you conducting this follow-up survey, but I immediately found the survey significantly flawed. In question 4, we're asked to rank 9 different possible Search features from most important to least important. SurveyMonkey has a "Ranking" question type for ranked answers — but this survey question is unfortunately not using it. I can only have one answer for each of the 5 columns: Very Important, Important, Slightly Important, Not Important, N/A. This means I can only fill in a radio button for 5 of the 9 rows; I can't assign any answer to the remaining 4 rows. Selecting "Very Important" for my first choice is fine, and selecting "Important" for my second choice is fine, but I object to having to choose "Slightly Important" and "Not Important" for my 3rd and 4th choices. My third most important selection in this list is more than "Slightly Important", and my 4th choice out of 9 should definitely not be marked as "Not Important". The responses it forced me to answer do NOT reflect my actual ranking of these options.

In order to get an accurate assessment of users' wishes for these features, please fix this survey! Either make it (a) a "Ranking" question to allow us to rank the 9 rows from 1 to 9, or (b) allow multiple answers in each column, so a user could, for example, mark 3 rows as "Very Important", 2 as "Important", 3 as "Slightly Important", and 1 as "Not Important". (Also fix that there are 3 "Next" pages with no content before the "Submit" page.)

Thank you!

Quicken Victoria

Sorry about that. It looks like there was a mistake in the setting…

Please try again now - https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/9G8NT8P

jacobs

@Quicken Victoria Thanks for fixing the settings for the ranking question! I was able to fill it out to accurately represent my ranking of possible features now. 😀