A year later, QMac Dashboard is still half-baked

RickB_Mac

There appears to be no way to get the Income & Expense Dashboard to reflect the transfer of loan principle for a mortgage payment. This makes the Income & Expense graph completely useless to anyone with a loan payment. Since forever, Quicken has always given a way to recognize an internal transfer for loan payments as an expense by simply excluding the loan account from the list of accounts for the report. QMac has had plenty of time to get these basic accounting principles right, and it's getting frustrating continuing to wait for this to be corrected.

Quicken Jasmine

Hello @RickB_Mac,

Thanks for sharing your feedback! I understand how frustrating it can be when key financial details, like loan principal payments, don’t display the way you need them to.

While the Income & Expense dashboard may not currently reflect these transfers as expenses, have you explored the Spending by Category dashboard card? Depending on your categorization, this might help provide a clearer breakdown of your loan-related expenses. Additionally, I’d like to refer you to this existing idea post: Add more categories to the Spending by Category dashboard card. If this aligns with your needs, you can vote on it to increase visibility for the development team.

If the current options still don’t meet your requirements, we encourage you to submit a new Idea Post outlining your specific request. This allows other users with similar needs to vote and provides direct feedback to our Development and Product teams.

Let us know if you have any questions—we appreciate your dedication to Quicken!

jacobs

QMac has had plenty of time to get these basic accounting principles right, and it's getting frustrating continuing to wait for this to be corrected.

This probably comes off as semantics, but the Income & Expense Dashboard does follow correct accounting principals. A loan payment is a transfer of an asset (cash) to a liability (loan), and is not an expense.

But because anyone with a loan knows that the monthly payment feels like an expense, Quicken's report and budgets have added features over time to allow the inclusion of transfers which are not technically expenses but act like one from a cash flow standpoint. The Dashboard doesn't (yet) have the ability to select transfers to include as expenses, but there are some ways to work around this…

In the Income & Expense card, if you click on the month graph or the totals, Quicken will pop open an Income & Expense - Details report. If you want, you can click on Edit and go to the Advanced tab to include transfers, if you want to see your loan payment reflected in the totals. This isn't something you can save, so you'd have to click to do this each time.

In the Spending by Category card, it will show the interest expense for your loan payments, but not the principal payments.

In the Top Spending Payees card, it will show your loan payment — the full amount of principal plus interest. You can mentally subtract that amount from the Net Income in the Income & Expense card to know your overall cash flow.