1-Month Budget Should Respect “Display Short Names” Setting (Q Mac)

02062

I’ve been a Quicken user for decades and stayed on Windows largely because I depended on Quicken. I tried Quicken for Mac years ago but found it noticeably behind the Windows version.

With my renewal coming up this month, I decided to give Quicken for Mac another shot despite low expectations given my detailed investment accounts and Schedule C/E activity. I was genuinely impressed: the conversion was better than 90%, and after a bit of cleanup and learning the workflow, I’m now finding the Mac version significantly better than Windows. It’s faster, more stable, and I prefer the interface. While I know some Windows features are missing, after a month of using only the Mac version (including for tax prep), I can’t point to anything I truly miss.

The idea: In Settings > Register, I’ve enabled Display Short Names, but the 1-Month Budget still shows long account names. Because the column width can’t be resized, long names get truncated. The 12-Month Budget correctly displays the short names. (See attached screenshot.)

jacobs

There was a previous Idea request for "Expand category column width in budget screen" seeking to just make the category column wider, or user-adjustable, on both the 1-month and 12-month budget screens. It was unfortunately archived a couple years ago due to lack of votes supporting the request.

The 12-month budget shows short names because the parent categories are shown above the sub-categories. I think it would make sense to change the 1-month budget to use the same format for the category column — and to make the column width adjustable.

The problem here is two-fold. First, the 1-month budget is a very old screen, carrying over from the 2010 Quicken Essentials for Mac which served as the code base for the current Quicken Mac, and it hasn't been significantly modified through all the years. Second, the entire budget portion of Quicken Mac is long overdue for a series of improvements which apparently require the code to be extensively re-written. So the developers have not implemented any of the often-requested budget improvements until they tackle the big project as a whole, because tweaks and improvements to the existing code would likely need to be re-done if they re-engineer the whole budget. There were indications in 2024 that they were undertaking the budget revamp project, but then nothing emerged throughout the past year. So either they've been working on it, and we can expect to see something emerge this year, or something scuttled the project and budget improvements remain in long-term limbo.