Group edit in Investment register

Stephen Fisher

When you click Edit to change several highlighted transactions at once in the brokerage register, the Edit function uses the Banking format instead of the Investment format, so you get “Payee” instead of Security, you don’t get “Type” , which is essential when say you want to, say, change Dividends to ROC, and you get “Category” from your bank registers with none of the Investing Categories available.

If someone here has authority to correct this bug, please also add Date to the multiple edit.

Quicken Anja

Hello @Stephen Fisher,

Thanks for reaching out!

I went ahead and changed your post to an Idea so other users who have the same or a similar request can vote on your idea by clicking the up arrow (see below).

Ideas are also reviewed by our Development and Product teams in order to improve Quicken and implement new features requested by customers.

Thank you!

Stephen Fisher

Thanks for doing that , but as I said, I see it as a bug, not a request. It needs fixing, not voting. Hard to get things done here, isn't it?

jacobs

@Stephen Fisher You see it as a bug, but the Powers That Be do not. 😉 A bug is when a feature was designed to do something and is doing something else; they consider it an enhancement, not a bug, if the issue is something the program wasn't designed to do. (And it's almost never considered a bug if the designers of a feature failed to design it well.) This can be super-frustrating to us as end users, because "common sense" often tells us the program should do a certain thing or work a certain way. And the programmers and product managers would likely agree with something like the issue you have raised here.

But implementing such a change requires examining the code, determining what work is necessary to add the functionality without breaking anything existing, designing what the user interface and actions should be, actually writing the code, and testing it — all of which takes time from various members of the Quicken Mac development team. And since there are many many tweaks, fixes, enhancements, and missing features all vying for the precious and limited commodity of their time, they have other evaluate which items are most urgent, would impact the largest number of people, and/or would make the biggest impact on the people who would use it. So they use voting on this forum as one way of gauging user interest in various changes. And so implementing a major new feature sometimes takes precedence over fixing a small bug; adding functionality which has no current work-around sometimes takes precedence over implementing a change which would make work easier or more efficient.

Interestingly, in the nearly 11 years that this program has been around, I don't think I recall anyone bringing up this particular issue before. I'd guess that probably means most users don't have a recurring need to mass-edit investment transactions, and they just edit them one at a time when they need to edit multiple transactions. But when I read your post, I nodded my head and thought, yes, it definitely should be possible to mass edit investment transactions. So I'll be the first to add my vote!

And while this might seem like a quick and easy fix to make, it probably isn't as simple as it seems. If you select three investment transactions and select Edit, the program would need to detect that they are investment transactions and display different fields to edit than for banking transactions. But what if you select three transactions from the All Transactions register, and two of them are banking while one is investment? What should the user interface look like? Or should it gray out and not allow selecting Edit if the selected transactions are not of the same type? Would that be apparent to users or confuse them? Should it pop up a dialog box to explain? All this (and likely more than I'm not thinking of off the top of my head) is what the managers and designers need to work through to in order to add this seemingly simple capability.

So yes, it's "hard to get things done here". 😉 There are features I've been waiting for since this program debuted in 2014 which still haven't made it to the top of the priority list. there are things product managers have said they would get to which still await action, likely because they would either consume a lot of time or aren't seen as pressing priorities. So all we can do is make the suggestions/requests, hope that fellow Quicken users will agree and add their votes and voices, and that the developers will in time see it and agree that it's something they need to address. It's a frustratingly slow process.

Stephen Fisher

Jacobs, thank you for the well thought out answer. I did not know there was a register thing called "ALL TRANSACTIONS" (and btw I have been using Quicken non-stop, since DOS versions in the 1980s) because I can't imagine why it would be necessary. In terms of the register I have only ever had one account at a time on the screen.

About this flaw. You should understand that Canadians (who pay the same price) have less functionality. Quicken does not allow any downloads from the brokerages, (though we can download banking transactions). So if we are active in the stock market we spend a lot of time every month manually entering transactions. And even though I do a lot of "Duplicate" it still requires amending at least the date and often the amount of the duplicated transaction. And then at tax time there can be big group changes. Say I receive a distribution from a REIT. At tax time I get the REIT's trust allocations. I have to reverse all those distributions and replace them with, say, Return of Capital or long term CapGain or whatever. You can begin to see how much time is spent doing manual entry.

The whole point of computers is to save the user doing repetitive work. This fails. Do you know that in my oldest DOS versions of Q I could schedule monthly dividend payments, but today each one needs manual entry?

Anyway, if I am in an Investment register, I don't see why the programme couldn't be smart enough to know to use the investment fields for the group edit. Just as if I'm in a bank register it would use the bank format. If it is mixed - something that you taught me exists - (sorry, I just can't imagine that a highlighted group for editing could be in both worlds). But if it did (weird!) it could just put up a warning "not available in this configuration".

Anyway now that I have explained how much manual work I have, it feels like 2 days/month, perhaps you understand how upset I am with this.

BTW, I clicked on a few things in order to cast my vote but didn't find the path to where I vote. Can you tell me how to do that pls?

jacobs

Anyway now that I have explained how much manual work I have, it feels like 2 days/month, perhaps you understand how upset I am with this.

@Stephen Fisher Yes, thanks for the detailed explanation of why you need to edit so many investment transactions on an ongoing basis. (I'm someone who enters investment transactions manually, so I can indeed "feel your pain." Hopefully, if/when this makes it to the development team for consideration in the future, your comments here will help them understand the "why" behind this request.

Do you know that in my oldest DOS versions of Q I could schedule monthly dividend payments, but today each one needs manual entry?

Yes, and there is a separate Idea thread requesting the addition of scheduled investment transactions. If you haven't previously added your vote and comment on that subject, I encourage you to do so by clicking the View Post link below:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7737061/add-ability-to-create-scheduled-investment-transactions-q-mac

That thread passed 30 votes, to it has a status of "Under Consideration", which signifies that the topic has been passed to the development team for their review and consideration. But more votes and especially comments about "why" or "how painful" can be useful in nudging the developers or helping them understand the use cases for implementing a change. If/when they decide to move ahead with implementing an Idea, the status will change to "Planned" to let us know it will be coming (even though we'll get no clue how soon it might arrive).

How to vote for an Idea topic? You need to scroll to the top of the thread (or jump to the first page if the comments span multiple pages), and under the original post, there is a yellow box. That box tells you when it was created, what the current status is, and it contains a vote counter. Under the count is an arrow. If the arrow is black, you have not yet votes for this Idea, and clicking it will add one to the count and change the arrow to light gray; if the arrow is already gray, it signifies you have previously voted for the Idea, and clicking it would remove your vote.

Because you created this topic, your vote may have been automatically counted; scroll up to see if the arrow is gray (it was counted) or black (you need to click it to add your vote). Since a moderator converted it from a non-Idea post originally, I'm not sure if it automatically adds a vote for you or not. (The software this site runs on has changed how that works several times over the years.)

Stephen Fisher

I added my vote to the "scheduled investment transactions" idea. Perhaps the reason nothing seemed to work for me when I tried to vote on my idea, was, as you said, my vote had already been registered.