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Hide All Subcategories Really Hide ALL Subcategories

kleinfelter

When I set Subcategories to "Hide All" on the Advanced report customization page, I'd like to really hide ALL subcategories. When I try to Hide All, I get "other <subcategory name>". e.g.

If my Category is "Computer", the report has "Computer" and "Other Computer". And if it has "Medical" it also has "Other Medical". I'd like to hide "Other Computer" and "Other Medical" too.

I'm trying to export my data into a spreadsheet, and I want only the top level of each Category. How do I get there?

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NotACPA

That "Other Computer" listing indicates that you used "Computer" itself, the parent cat, as a category in a transaction rather than using one of the sub-cats. Same for "Other Medical".

SO, either edit such transactions to use a subcat or accept the situation.

Boatnmaniac

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20517322#Comment_20517322

I think this assumes that there are other subcategories listed under the parent category. If there are no subcategories for "Computer" then entering "Computer" as the transaction category should simply return "Computer" in reports and not "Computer:Other".

kleinfelter

Sigh. Yeah, this is why closed systems such as Quicken are a bad idea. Extracting a list of categories (without their real or imagined subcategories) is a pretty basic operation that appears to be unavailable.

I'm not far from retirement. That event, when I switch from accumulating to spending down, will provide a logical point to consider starting afresh on a platform with an accessible data model.

Jim_Harman

Which report are you running, and what exactly do you want to see? Do you want a list of all the Categories, just the ones you have used, or what? What other data besides the Category names?

If you are running a report that you have customized and saved, you may find that running one of the built in reports works better.

If you open the Spending by Category report and select Collapse all, you should just see the top level Categories and their totals. You can customize the report to include Income categories and investing accounts if you want.

Also see this discussion and the earlier one referenced there

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7967052/status-request-on-subcategories-hide-all-does-not-work-ticket-ctp-13045

NotACPA

@kleinfelter But the fundamental question is: Do your "Computer" and "Medical" categories each have sub-cats, and have you assigned transactions to the parent cats?

Boatnmaniac

If you have assigned some purchases to the parent category when there are sub-categories, why is that?

Is it that they are miscellaneous purchases that you do not really want to track in detail with their own sub-categories?

If so, then why not create a new sub-category for them called "Misc"?

Quicken's reporting of income and expenses is very logical: A parent category will simply be the sum of all it's sub-categories.

But if transactions are also being entered against the parent category when there are sub-categories, then the total of the parent category will be greater than the sum of the sub-categories which causes the report to lack credibility.

To resolve this issue, Quicken will assign the parent category transactions to this "Other" sub-category. Doing this allows the total of the parent category to match the sum of the sub-categories.

So, to avoid this, add a "Misc" sub-category to the parent category. Then if you do not want to include Misc in your reports you can customize the reports to exclude the "Misc" sub-category from the report which will also decrement the Misc dollar amount from the parent category roll-up.

kleinfelter

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20517322#Comment_20517322

Oh, if only that were what is happening, I agree I could create my own subcategory for Computer-not-otherwise-specified.

If I take my "Education" category for the month of October as an example, every transaction is assigned to a specific subcategory — none are assigned to just "Education". Yet when I select totals-only and "hide subcategories", the data exported from the report manifests an "Other Education" subcategory.

kleinfelter

Spending > Itemized Categories, as it initially renders, shows exactly the information I want to export. Note that this report initially appears with all of the categories that have transactions and it DOES NOT SHOW the subcategories unless you click on a "+".

The issue is that there is no (apparent) way to export this view as data. If you export it as it initially renders, all of the subcategories show up IN ADDITION TO the categories. If you customize the report by selecting "Totals Only" you still get some subcategories. If you set Subcategories = "Hide All" the real subcategories disappear and many categories sprout a visible subcategory of "Other [category-name-here]".

It did occur to me that there might actually be a way to export all my Quicken transactions (at least going back for a few years -- it is probably too cumbersome to apply the process all the way back to the beginning of my data in the 1990s).

If I find a report that lists all transactions for a given period, including date, payee, category, and amount, I could run that report monthly, export it to Excel, and import it into a SQL database, and then I've got my Quicken data in an accessible format, to use in my financial modeling software.

Jim_Harman

If you don't need all the details of your investing transactions, you should be able to do what you want by exporting the Banking > Transaction report with Show Splits selected.

You would have to clean up the gaps in the repeated data when there are split transactions.

pablomiller

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20517568#Comment_20517568

Reports … it's a bit of a menagerie, with so many different reports, and ways of attempting to get what you want, and so many ways to either get it wrong, or not quite get what you want … Anyway, I might suggest trying the following pre-defined Report:

Spending > Income and Expense by Category … be cautious and alert about customizations, as there are many ways to inadvertently include or exclude something important. In the Accounts tab, you may wish to select All Accounts, including checking Hidden and Separates Accounts to be all inclusive. I generally check to make sure all Categories, Payees, and Tages are included, including uncategorized. Then in Advanced, I generally prefer Excluding All Transfers and of course, for Hide All Subcategories. Depending on the Date Range you've selected, you may want to select an appropriate Interval so you have columns on a reasonable timescale. Of course, you will have both Income and Expense groups of Categories.

Good luck @kleinfelter

Now, maybe someone (Superusers ?) may wish to offer the book answer on the practical difference between Spending categories and Expenses categories (as in the Income/Expenses report). I think for correctly functioning Hide All reports, there is (or should be) no difference. However, for Show All, there are clearly differences, in terms of how "parent" (non-subcategory) items are shown, and how Totals are shown, and I still believe there are bugs in how some Subcategories are being displayed in the raw Quicken report … I'll reserve that for another post, since it's not quite on topic for this one.