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Invoice items with negative rates and invoice items as percentages (+ or -) (Q Mac)

GriffeyDog

I have Quicken Classic For Mac Business and Personal, version 8.4. I need to be able to have invoice items that can have negative rates. I can set them up that way in Products and Services, but the negative value turns positive when I use it on an invoice, particularly when I tab through the rate field. Can the development team look into this? Secondly, it would be greatly helpful if we could have invoice items that are a percentage (either positive or negative) of the preceding line item, like the Windows version has.

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Quicken Mac

Comments

jacobs

@GriffeyDog If might help the developers if you briefly explain your use case for having a negative rate on an invoice. (Also be aware that a lot of Quicken teams shut down for a week around Christmas, so it might take a little while to get a response.)

MODERATORS: There does seem to be a discrepancy between Quicken allowing a negative rate in Products and Services but not allowing a negative rate on an invoice line item. Which is the intended behavior, and which one is wrong? It would help if you could question the development team about this.

Quicken Kristina

Hello @GriffeyDog,

Thank you for sharing your experience. I tried to replicate the issue, but was not able to get a negative rate to save in Products and Services. Every time I click out of the field, the minus sign vanishes. How are you able to set up the negative rate in Products and Services?

@jacobs,

Per your request, I created a ticket to ask internally if this is intended behavior or not.

Thank you!

(CTP-15744)

NotACPA

@GriffeyDog It would help us to understand your issue if you'd elaborate on "negative rate".
What? And, Why?

UKR

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20528729#Comment_20528729

I'm guessing that the OP wants to create a Discount line item, similar to this sample for Q Windows:

It might be helpful if someone could provide an example for Q Mac.

jacobs

@UKR Quicken Mac invoicing has the option to add a discount: either a dollar amount or a percentage of the invoice amount:

There are some limitations with this approach. There is no ability to apply a different discount to different line items; you'd have to do that by creating separate invoices. Also, there is no control of what category to apply the discount to; it automatically goes into a built-in Returns & Allowances category. So if I wanted to give a customer a 10% discount and simply record the net invoice amount in my selected revenue category, I can't do that; Quicken Mac will record the line item amount invoiced in the appropriate revenue category and the discount in the Returns & Allowances category.

Drilling down on an Income Statement report does detail which client and invoice each discount comes from; so if it were really necessary to straighten up my P&L, I could do a zero dollar transaction at the end of a month or year to reduce Returns & Allowances and reduce the desired revenue category(ies).

I think for most of the small business users Quicken Mac is aiming to serve, neither of these limitations are critical flaws.

GriffeyDog

@jacobs

The specific use cases I personally have are as follows. I am an IT consultant that works with a client where I subcontract through a 3rd party. Additionally, there is a fourth party that handles all IT contract work for the State of Wisconsin, which is my client. My invoices are for my billable hours at my billable rate (what the client pays). But I then need to deduct a certain hourly amount that goes to the company I subcontract though. And I also need to deduct a percentage of my billing for the fourth part mentioned above. That allows me to arrive at the amount that I will get paid. I should also mention I have multiple projects with the State that are at different hourly rates. My invoice goes to the company I subcontract through, and they need to see all of these details. It looks something like this:

Line 1: Billable hours: 25 hours @ xx.xx $/hour = <amount billed to client>

Line 2: Percentage deduction for 4th party (-1.5% of above line) = -yy.yy

Line 3: Deduction for subcontracting: 25 hours @ -zz.zz $/hr = -dd.dd

Invoice total = sum of lines 1 - 3.

The Windows version handles all of this perfectly. I can set up "percentage" item with a negative percentage, which applies to the previous line item it is used under. And I can setup another item that simply has a negative rate.

GriffeyDog

@Quicken Kristina

Regarding the question of how I was able to setup the negative rate in Products and Services: I may have done that in version 8.3. I am unable to setup new items with the negative rate in v8.4, the minus sign disappears when you leave the field.

jacobs

@GriffeyDog Thanks for providing the specifics of what you were looking for. Since the Quicken Mac approach is to apply a discount to the subtotal of the line items, I don't envision the creating dollar or percentage discounts as line items the way you describe it working in Quicken windows.

But I don't see why the developers couldn't easily enable Rate to be a negative number, which would kill two birds with one stone: (1) It would allow you to create a line item form of a discount, and (2) It would allow the discount to come out of the same revenue category at the positive line item, rather than being locked into the Reurns & Allowances category used by the invoice-wide Discount field. I think this is a reasonable request of the development team, and it appears to be an easy change to allow negative values for line item Rate and Amount fields. @Quicken Kristina could you add this to your original CTP-15744 note to the developers?

Quicken Kristina

Thank you for the additional information,

I added the information to the CTP.

GriffeyDog

@jacobs @Quicken Kristina Thanks so much. I look forward to having the ability to enter negative values in the rate field.