Totals in my Reports are Inaccurate - BY A LOT!

hdune

I was going over my finances yesterday with my financial advisor and realized that my alcohol category was over by $800.00! What else is inaccurate? What the Hell? I should be able to click on my yearly report and not have to proof everything. Quicken is supposed to make my accounting easier, not more difficult. Excel would be easier to correct at this point.

Why aren't my reports working?

jacobs

It's impossible to say what the problem is based on the information you have provided; we aren't seeing any of your data. So I can only offer some general comments…

I'm not aware of there being problems other users have reported with inaccuracies in reports.

There is one exception to that statement: if you are using the old report called "Category Summary", it is known to have data errors under certain conditions. This is a deprecated report which for some reason the developers have not yet removed from the program. You should instead be using "Category Summary by [period]" or "Transactions by Category" reports. (In the Reports section of the program, the few reports with a gray icon are the old reports; all the modern reports have color icons.)

One other thing to be aware of is if you have any transactions are transfers and also have an income/expense category. By the proper rules of accounting, a transaction can be income/expense, or it can move funds from one account to another, but it can't be both at the same time. Due to a quirk in the long history of the development of Quicken Mac, the program allows such transactions to be created if the fields are entered in a particular order. The folks at Quicken have said they will eliminate the ability to create such transactions, but they haven't gotten around to it yet. If you do have any such improper transactions, they can possibly be the source of report error, because the code has to decide whether the transaction to show the transaction as an expense or a transfer, and it may not be doing what you'd want or expect. If you do have any such transactions, I recommend going back and removing income/expense categories from your transfer transactions. That might resolve issues with some reporting anomalies.

Beyond those caveats, you need to dig in to see what's wrong with your data. Are there missing transactions? Are transactions encoded with incorrect categories? Data errors are often the culprit, whether from things missing or duplicated from downloads, or manual data entry errors. (We all make data entry errors at some point!)

So you say you have a category which is off by over $800. How do you know it was off? That is, what are you comparing the report to which reveals the discrepancy? Are you looking at a summary report? If so, generate a transaction report for that category so you can see the individual transactions and see what's either missing, duplicated, or inaccurate.

If you can provide more information about this category, how you're reporting on it, and how you know it's wrong, we might be able to offer more targeted help to track it down and fix it. But as I said, with you just saying "a category is off, why isn't it working?" it's impossible for us to dig deeper to help.