Make Tax Report dates default to LAST Year at beginning of a new year

jacobs

This annoys me every single year after the calendar rolls into a new year: it's January, I generate any of the tax reports, and Quicken quickly shows "no transactions match filter settings" because the report defaults to the current year, not the just-concluded year. But in January 2025, I don't want a tax report for the year which just started, January 2025 through December 2025, I want a report for last year, January 2024 through December 2024. I constantly have to go to Edit and change the dates to view the report. And because I don't need to save each tax report for a specific year, I don't save each report with the edited dates, so I have to do this each time I come back to generate a tax report.

Request: For the various Tax reports, at the beginning of a new year, Quicken should default to dates starting January 1 and ending December 31 of the prior year. At some specified date — end of first quarter? April 15? April 30? — the default dates could then switch to the current year.

Chris_QPW

For what it is worth, with Quicken Windows it is all over the board, no consistent behavior for this. So, hopefully for Quicken Mac if they implement this, they will do it consistently.

jacobs

I realize this could be a bit of a Pandora's box: if this applies to tax reports, what about other reports which might typically be backward-looking at the start of a new year and forward-looking later in a year? So for this request, I identified one specific group of Quicken Mac reports — the tax reports — where I think it would serve almost all users to have the default dates set to the prior year early in a new year. (Of course, users can always customize the dates; this is just about what the default dates should be when one opens a report.)

On the other hand, I think it would be problematic to do this for all reports, because many users probably do look at income and expenses for the current year starting in January.

(Okay, I'd also single out the Net Worth report for a special tweak: I think most users would appreciate it if it opened defaulted to the last day of the prior month, rather than to today's date.)

I'd also be okay if upon selecting certain reports, like the tax reports, Quicken Mac popped up a dialog box asking me to choose "This Year" or "Last Year" before generating the report. But that would entail a change to how reports work, and I didn't want this feature request to get complicated. Changing the default dates for certain reports requires no new dialog boxes, no new workflow, and no code changes beyond a simple conditional line in the code for setting the default report date based on the current date.

Chris_QPW

Oh, I might not have been clear of what I meant about Quicken Windows. I was talking only about the tax reports, not other reports. Let me give you some examples to show what I meant.

The defaults:

Capital Gains (this year)

Schedule A (last year)

Schedule B (Last year)

Schedule D (last year)

Tax Schedule (this year)

Tax Summary (this year)

FBAR (last year)

NotACPA

@jacobs, Define "the beginning of the new year". January? Thru February? Thru 4/15?

Because of the way that I manage (closely) my taxes, I still want to see current year tax info thru, at least, the 1st quarter (Quarterly Estimated Taxes). So, my having to pay attention to what I'm doing is a MINOR price to pay for accuracy.

I'd vote AGAINST this, if I could.

jacobs

Define "the beginning of the new year". January? Thru February? Thru 4/15?

It could be any of those or some other date, as I stated in the request: some arbitrary early portion of the year.

I'd vote AGAINST this, if I could.

You can always change the date for any report; I'm only discussing what it defaults to. When I generated a few tax reports today, January 2, there's almost no chance that I wanted a tax report for 2025. 😀

In Quicken Mac, which may be different than Quicken Windows which you use, if you double-click on one of the stock reports, it opens the report based on defaults; you then click Edit, select the date range, click OK, and the report will be updated to the new date range. Or, if you're on your game and know the default will be wrong for what you want, you can single-click on a report name, click Edit, set the date, click OK, and generate the correct report from the outset. But either way way it's a few extra clicks every time you create a report.

I believe that a majority of users generating a tax report in January will want a report on the prior year, not the few days or weeks in the current year. Therefore, Quicken could make it easier for the large majority by changing the default dates for a time at the beginning of the year; why make 90%+ of people need to edit the date to get to a usable report rather than make it the default?

It's not a big deal. We can live without it. I just think it's a very small, easy change that could be made to prevent thousands of users from selecting a report, seeing no data, and either grumbling ("oh, darn it, it gets me every new year") or scratching their heads ("why is there no data in the report??"), determining it's set for the wrong year, and changing the dates.