re: ticket number 11437045 transfer column and category column malfunction

scottsp

I am working on a MacBook Pro OS 14.7.1 (23H222) on Quicken Classic Deluxe Version 7.10.1 (Build 710.55389.100)

I was informed, regarding the information included in this support ticket, that though I could document a behavior change in the software HAD occurred after Jan 2024, I would be told the current behavior is what it has been and what it is meant to do and nothing else would happen if this matter was escalated. I was told instead of escalating this I should layout the behaviors ( past and present ) in this forum, as it may have a different outcome.

BACKGROUND

I have two checking accounts at the same bank.  I download transactions directly thru quicken.  I regularly modify both the payee field and the category fields to allow for tracking of those transactions.  I frequently make online transfers of money from acct 5427 to acct 9636. After I ask Quicken to update my accounts and it downloads all the transactions to date,   I typically change the payee name in acct 5427 to Tierney, change the category from transfer to a more appropriately trackable value ( food; allowance, etc…) and  then add a link between the two accts thru the transfer column.  When I hit accept the modification to this transaction ( rtn key), a popup states there is a related transaction in acct 9636 on x date with x payee and do I want to link it.  I accept this.

[Image 1] is an example of this transfer on 8 Jan 2024 between the two account as I have expected it to occur.   I track the money transferred thru both payee and category. 

BEHAVIORS

Sometime after mid January, something changed in Quicken and I can no longer apply my own category to these linked transactions. The following is based on examples drawn from a transaction occuring on 9 December 2024.

Currently, after the transactions are downloaded, I change all the data in the fields as described in the background paragraph, [Images 2 and 3].  When I hit rtn to save the changes in the 5427 acct (to subsequently modify the 9636 acct), the same popup appears.  However, when I accept [Image 4], Quicken then changes the name in the transactions in both accounts (desirable), but eliminates the category I chose and replaces it with Transfer:”acct name” [Image 5].  (Undesirable)

• When I go back to change the category again [Image 6], this immediately eliminates the link in the transfer column  and when I hit rtn, a different popup comes up stating- “Are you sure you want to save your changes? You are changing the category on one side of a transfer transaction, which will result in the other side being deleted”. It gives me the option to save the changes, go to transfer or cancel. 
• If I save, both transactions retain the payee field changes, both transactions remove my category change and replace it with ‘Transfer’, the original category when it was downloaded, and the Transfer column is eliminated in both transactions, unlinking the two transactions.[Image 7]
• Choosing Go to Transfer or Cancel, the same action, name is retained, category stays as  Transfer:”acct name”.[Image 5]
• This behavior holds regardless of which account I initiate the change of the category- the end result is same, the transfer column is wiped and no link remains between the accounts.

SUMMARY

I would submit that Quicken’s behavior in how it handles downloaded transfer transactions for accounts that are all contained in a single Quicken file has changed from the beginning of the year to present.

The end result is I cannot re-categorize any transfers between accounts and thus cannot adequately track why that money is being spent in a report that I would create at any point during the year.  

This is NOT a new feature I am asking for, this is a feature I would like to have back so I can track expenses and create accurate reports across accounts.

Any thoughts?  

Thank you-

Scott Saltzman

Jon

Quicken's position for a long time has been that transfers shouldn't have categories even though the software has allowed that to happen in the past. I did notice at some point during the year that this loophole seems to have closed (or at least gotten much harder to take advantage of). Generally, the idea is that categories are for either spending or income, and when you move money from one account to another it is neither of those things - you didn't spend the money because you still have it, and it wasn't income because you already had it.

I think it's pretty unlikely that they will change their minds on this point. What is it you're trying to accomplish by signing a category to a transfer?

scottsp

we frequently transfer money from one of our checking accounts to our college aged daughter's checking account. As I have little control over her account and what, how and where she is spending, I have tried to at least keep track of what monies we transfer and for what purpose.

jacobs

You can track transfers; you just can't categorize them as expenses because they are simply transfer software funds from one asset account to another.

@scottsp You transfer money to your daughter. Are you tracking her checking account in your Quicken data file, categorizing what she spend her money on? If so, the transfers aren't the expense; the expenses are recorded as the transactions which document the money coming out of her checking account. I'd suggest that since these aren't your expenses, they probably shouldn't be included in your own net worth and spending history. (Do you have the account marked as "Separate" or is it a regular account?) Of course, you can generate a report of just the transfers to her account. On the other hand, if you aren't really tracking her actual spending, you could record the transfer to her account as regular expenses: e.g. Payee=daughter's name, no transfer, category=purpose(s) of the funds you're giving her.

jacobs

@scottsp said: I would submit that Quicken’s behavior in how it handles downloaded transfer transactions for accounts that are all contained in a single Quicken file has changed from the beginning of the year to present.

I wasn't aware they had made such a change, but if they did, then it's fulfillment of something they stated they'd do several years ago. In accounting, a transfer between accounts is not an expense or income; the ability to apply a category to a transfer was an accounting flaw in Quicken, due to some old history of the program's evolution I won't dive into here.

The former Quicken Mac product manager said this back in January 2020:

Our leadership team has decided that categories on transfers violates core accounting principals that our products should be based on and we are slowly removing this functionality from the Mac but haven't done it yet because we needed to add the advanced transfer, adjustment and cash flow capabilities we just added in 5.13 and 5.14.  We're now working on improving Transfer and mortgage payment support in budgets.  Once this is complete, we will start the process of removing the ability to add a category to a transfer.

…and this in September 2020:

Quicken Mac theoretically does support transfers on categories but we're going to remove that capability in the not too distant future because it's not supported by the Quicken Cloud and Quicken Windows.  I can see your argument that it would be useful and Quicken Windows supports tax line items on transfer transactions to support tax reporting which is a kind of category on a transfer so there's a use case. However, the bottom line is the Mac product must line up with the rest of the Quicken ecosystem. This decision was made at the highest levels of our company so it's not going to be revisited.

So your request to restore the old functionality is unlikely to be heeded. This was an intentional change.

The end result is I cannot re-categorize any transfers between accounts and thus cannot adequately track why that money is being spent in a report that I would create at any point during the year. 

Even though you can't categorize a transfer, you should be able to create reports and budgets to document your spending. In a report, it's possible to include transfers if the report is properly configured to include some accounts and not others and the Reports > Edit > Advanced tab is selected to "Include selected transfers with accounts outside of report". Although such transfers won't be lumped in with expense categories, they will be detailed as pseudo expenses in your reports. An example would be if you move money to a savings account to save for a vacation (or other purpose); your report can include such transfers.

Alternatively, if you transfer money from one account to another, and then spend money from the receiving account, you can categorize the expenses when the money is spent. An example would be if you pay a mortgage and part of the payment is a transfer to an escrow account; when your insurance or taxes are paid out of the escrow account, recording those transactions in the escrow account allows you to categorize your actual expenses.

scottsp

I gave up on tracking her spending as I do ours, partly because it does not really matter in the long run ( was supposed to be an assistance to her, but she does not value it), partly because there is no way I can categorize on HER side with all the Venmo/ etc… expenses her generation incurs, partly because I really did not WANT to care that much and just allow her to work it out.

On OUR side though, I want to track what we are giving her over any given time frame and in what gross categories ( allowance, food, etc…) it is being given for. Thus the reason for the categories. I think I see why I could just blow off the transfer completely, as for us, it is a regular expense, not JUST a transfer of an asset. appreciate you

jacobs

On OUR side though, I want to track what we are giving her over any given time frame and in what gross categories ( allowance, food, etc…) it is being given for. Thus the reason for the categories. I think I see why I could just blow off the transfer completely, as for us, it is a regular expense, not JUST a transfer of an asset.

Yes, I think I would enter these as payments to her, which you can categorize as appropriate, including splits (50% food/50% allowance, or whatever) and memo notes. Then create a report for just her as the Payee, so you can see at a glance how much you've given her over any period of time.

Chris_QPW

Tags might be useful in for this too, but given the situation, I'm with @jacobs on this for no other reason than I would consider the "other side of the transaction" to be outside of scope of your data file. When you make a purchase from Safeway that is an expense that you categorize, you don't try to categorize the other side of that transaction for Safeway's books. Her account doesn't belong in your data file unless you are the one controlling it.

scottsp

I did consider tags at recently, just did not want to go thru the headache of redoing the whole structure of categories I had created. I see what y'all are saying… the only control we have on that account is because it is linked to ours and whether and how much money to put in. Thanks for the input.

as I was a researcher in a different life, I am still curious about the fact I COULD manage it this way previously and quicken made a decision to cut that off…. but bigger fish to fry. Thanks!

jacobs

I am still curious about the fact I COULD manage it this way previously and quicken made a decision to cut that off…. but bigger fish to fry. 

the re-write of Quicken Mac from the ground up over a decade ago had a long and somewhat tortured history back when Quicken was part of Intuit. the first attempt at a new product was so bad that it never made it out of beta testing. The second effort was released rather suddenly in 2010 in an effort to bring something, albeit woefully incomplete, to market. That product was called "Quicken Essentials for Macintosh", with the name conveying it had only certain core features of Quicken, not the complete functionality longtime Mac or Windows users would expect. In that product, there were no investment accounts. There was also no way to specifically include transfers in reports or budgets, so the programmers allowed transfers to also have categories. But that design decision had odd ramifications because it broke some basic rules of accounting.

Quicken Essentials was the "1.0" version of a new Mac product, and after investment accounts were grafted on, the 2.0 version was released as Quicken Deluxe in 2014. It took several additional years of development to add functionality to be able to include transfers as separate line items in reports and in budgets, but once those changes were made, the writing was on the wall: it was time to close the loophole which had been created back in 2010. Thus the comments from the former Quicken Mac product manager which I quote above about the plans to remove the dual transfer/category properties of transactions. The problem the developers faced was how to do so without messing up the existing data of users who had categorized transfers.

There's never been any announcement about it, but it seems the developers' approach was to remove the capability to create new transactions of that sort, without forcing the removal/editing of existing transactions. So that's my best explanation about why you could do this in the past but can't do so any longer. I feel it's actually the correct decision, because Quicken shouldn't be breaking the rules of accounting; transfers of funds between assets and liabilities may feel like an expense from a cash flow viewpoint, but transfers aren't expenses. Instead, Quicken Mac now gives users ways to create reports or budgets which include selected transfers for the times users want that cash flow reporting.

Chris_QPW

I remember the history slightly different.

What I remember is that Intuit acquired Mint just about that time, and as such it influenced Quicken Mac Essentials development a lot. I don't know if you ever used Mint, especially in the early days, but the most it ever had for investment accounts was the "totals". And if you look at a lot of these web-based products, including what Mint had, they don't have "linked transfers". At the most the "category" is "transfer".

So, it wasn't as much that the programmers "allowed transfers to have categories" as that other than making "Transfer" a "built-in/reserved" category it wasn't anything special, it was just another category.

When the development got to the point where they were going to put in linked transfers, they had to weigh breaking this outright and upsetting everyone and slowly push the idea that you now have expenses, income, and transfers. And just like you can't have a transaction that is both an expense and income, you can't have a transfer that is also an expense or income.

scottsp

chris and jacobs- thank you so much for the history lesson- regardless of the particular flow, seems you both came to the same end point. the information the two of you ( and Jon) have gotten me to two related points- one-I feel I better understand the what and the reasoning behind the why and thus satisfying my research bone and two- by understanding all this, I will no longer hold out that the Quicken developers will take up my cause, re-write the rules of accounting and give me back my categories for transfers :-)

I really do appreciate y'all and all the assistance wrapping my somewhat petrified brain around this issue.

If you celebrate as such, hoping your holiday season, in whatever form it takes, is peaceful.

Scott