My Reports no longer work after upgrading to Quicken Classic Business & Personal (Mac)

agridley

I’ve been a longtime user of Quicken for Mac and had the software configured to generate separate "My Reports" for each rental property. I did this by creating identical business categories for each rental. I could quickly toggle/select the desired categories for accurate YTD summary reports for each property.

However, since upgrading to "Business & Personal," this functionality no longer works as expected. Here's what I've done so far:

1. Created each rental as its own business in the "Business" tab.
2. Linked each bank account to its corresponding rental business.
3. Assigned the correct business to each transaction.
4. Categorized transactions using the new Business Categories provided during the upgrade (e.g., Advertising).

Despite these steps, my YTD reports in "My Reports" are now inaccurate. Quicken seems unable to distinguish expenses by property because all rentals share the same single set of Business Categories.

For example, I no longer see "Rental 1 - Lawn and Garden" expenses TYD; instead, I see a merged "Lawn and Garden" total for all properties (even though I'm in a custom report only for Rental 1).

I assumed that by tying transactions to a specific business in the "Business" tab Quicken would isolate expenses when running a report, but that doesn't appear to be the case. The only potential workarounds I see are:

1. Separate Bank Accounts: Toggle on/off specific bank accounts when running report to isolate expenses for each rental. Unfortunately, some rentals share accounts, so this won’t solve the issue.
2. Tags: Tag every transaction with the corresponding rental business name, then toggle on/off tags in reports to isolate the property I wanna see. This is cumbersome and not ideal.
3. Duplicate Categories: Recreate a specific set of income/expense categories for each rental (as I did before the upgrade). While feasible, it clutters dropdown menus and requires significant setup.

I was excited to upgrade to Business & Personal, but the business delineation seems to be irrelevant in custom "My Reports."

Please advise on how to resolve this or if there’s a better solution. Thanks!

jacobs

I've done some testing of Business & Personal, but I'm not using it for live work on a business, so doing category reports for specific businesses is something I probably didn't think about previously. It does seem that Category and Summary reports, which were created before the business features existed, should be updated to allow a user to specify one or multiple or all businesses.

In the meantime, I think you might be able to get some of what you want, in a slightly convoluted way:

• Go to Reports > Business and select Business Income Statement
• From the dropdown menu, select the business you want to report on

This will produce a report of all income and expenses for the business. But if you want, you can now Edit the report to only include selected categories, or even a single category. You can save this as a new custom report.

Unfortunately, while this gives you a way to create a Summary report for the category(ies) you want for a selected business(es) I can't see a way to create a Transaction report using the same business criteria. The best you can do is to use the summary report and click on the amount of any category to open a drill-down transaction report on that category.

MontanaKarl

There shouldn't be a problem, @agridley , but I'm not sure that you set things up quite correctly for the business features. Your old way of nested categories per rental property was fine… and you do not need to switch to the new Business categories… as much as change your old categories to be of type Business. If all rentals were under a single "business", then your old nest of category trees would have worked. As you've created a new business for each property (I think because each property has its own Schedule E) - then only one category nest would have been necessary.

For reports, the default is "All businesses" which will merge transactions for all of your rentals. You'll have to create a new report for one rental… then duplicate that, switch to each other rental and memorize that to recreate your reports. Sadly, QMac has no means of generating columns-per-business (e.g.) to see all properties split out on a single report.

Before QMac had business functionality, I had a top level category tree called "Business" with tons of subcategories. From the Windows > Categories list, I edited that category to switch usage from the default of Personal to Business as seen here:

NOTE that categories are NOT attached to individual businesses. Any business can use any business category.

Hope that helps?

Your old reports cannot generate what you want unless you make ALL of the old category trees business categories and continue using them. At some point (January 1?) you'll probably want to switch to the "Business" edition way of distinguishing transactions. Basically, the old way was using a parent category to distinguish each of your properties (with subcategories identical across all properties). The "new" way is that a Business distinguishes each property… and there is just a common set of categories and reports filter by Business.

Alternatively… you can make all of your rentals be one "Business" and continue distinguishing properties using the categories that you used to use… after editing the root/parent category to be of type Business. Then, you'd filter for your reports by category as you always have. This could be the easiest transition?

Sorry for rambling and not proof reading the above…

agridley

Thanks for the comments. @MontanaKarl you state:

The "new" way is that a Business distinguishes each property… and there is just a common set of categories and reports filter by Business.

I agree and set up all my businesses to use the new common set of categories for Business.

I think what is also new is that the old "My Report" categories do not work properly with Business. You MUST use the Business Reports only. For some reason old Report categories such as "Comparison, Transaction" etc don't filter by Business. So the reports are best used only for the Personal nest of categories. At least that's what I'm seeing so far??

MontanaKarl

Correct. As @jacobs pointed out, Business-filtering has not been added to most of the reports yet - limiting what can be generated in the current release. We all hope that the developers flesh that out in coming updates.

You said that you set up your business to use 'the new common set of categories for Business". Those, like all personal categories are basically out of the box "suggestions". As I pointed out in the screenshot, you can make anything you want be a Business Category. Once you declare a category as Business (vs Personal), Quicken requires you to enter a Business name in the transaction field… and if none is entered Quicken will enter the default business (which will be wrong more often than not when you have multiple businesses).