Wow!!! Include or Exclude Transfers in Budgets in Quicken for Mac 2019 still MIA!
What is going on? Another year passes and still no ability in Quicken for Mac 2019 to include or exclude transfers in Budgets. Very, very disappointing!!!!!!!!! It doesn't seem the Quicken for Mac Development team is listening!!!!
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Strange though there is this list, which seems to have just a "few" features you haven't mentioned:
https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/expanded-list-of-categorized-ideas-of-feature-requests-and-enhancements-to-vote-on-for-quicken-for-mac
But saying they aren't listening just isn't accurate, since the product manager has acknowledged the need for this functionality and said they will add it.
Also, that it's in part an "architectural issue" shouldn't be "very concerning"; it simply provides context to say this isn't a simple under-the-hood or user interface fix. For the sake of accuracy, Marcus used that term in response to requests to be able to include investment income in budgets as well -- a different but related issue to adding transfers to budgets. Here's what he said last December: "Investment transactions are very different than your typical banking register transactions and similarly, the categories are different. Architecturally the budget is tied to the banking transactions and not investments so there's a bunch of work we have to do to make investments work also. If it was easy we would have done it already." That's when he said they'd tackle it after the re-write of Quicken Cloud services was complete. So it shouldn't be "concerning"; he didn't say they can't program it, only that it was more a complex issue than it might appear to be on the surface.
Again, I understand the frustration for people who have been waiting for this since budgets were originally added to Quicken Mac 29 months ago. But there have been two key milestones since then, with Marcus saying last year that the developers would work on it after the Quicken Cloud/mobile app budget re-write was complete, and then about two months ago that project being completed. To me, that suggests we're into a "no more excuses, the path is clear to do this" time period, and I would expect they are likely working on it at this time. We have no indication on timing other than that it's significant -- I don't know if this is a 2-month project or a 5-month project -- but to me, all signs point to something being released later this year or early next year.
Quicken Essentials came out without linked transfers, and instead had that "transfer field". And then later they added linked transfers.
Now basically they have two ways to indicate transfers. I would bet that makes it a lot more complicated to get right.
What's more besides this direct problem I notice things popping up their "heads" over in the "Quicken cloud" world.
There are these differences between the way Quicken Windows and Quicken Mac are doing things, and the Quicken Cloud has to support them both.
One that comes to mind is reviewing transactions. I see you can now review transaction on Quicken Web and have that sync back to the the Desktop.
The model they choose for this is of course the "automatic entry"/review model. There isn't a separate Downloaded Transactions tab/accept flow.
But of course Quicken Windows Desktop has both flows, so they have to take that into account.
When Quicken Essentials was being created the focus wasn't only to just rewrite it, but people have forgotten that way back then the major complaint by the users was "It is just a port of Quicken Windows, give us a 'Mac' version". So that was the plan, to rewrite in in "Mac style" and do things in a way that made sense for that kind of "flow/environment".
It sort of looks like that is coming back to bite them, as the Quicken "world" is "merging" together.
BTW the progress on Quicken Mac does seem slow to me too, but as a person that has been in such "trenches", I can say it is never what it looks like from a distance.
If you aren't in the "trench" you have no idea of what kind of problems those people are facing. Everything from things like selling Quicken to being understaffed, and political fights, to mistakes, to wrong processes, to people not having the right experience, to actual technical problems.
What I think is much more likely to be a complication is a change the developers made in QMac to allow there to be a transfer and a category on a transaction, something that QWin and previous QMac implementations didn't allow. It has some practical application for some users, but since it pretty much breaks the normal rules of accounting, I think that's going to be a mess to implement transfers into budgets and some reports which don't currently look at transfers.
One history I know a bit more about (but not much) is that transfers have been a "problem" for Quicken Cloud.
At first they were showing up as an unknown category, and you couldn't set them from Quicken mobile. With the recent changes they have got better, but you can get "in trouble" if you sync one account from the transfer and not the other.
I see that they are actually in the budget now (for Quicken Windows syncs).
I certainly wonder what kind of complaints the Mac people are going to throw out because Web and Mobile follow Quicken Windows conventions and don't have a way to have both a category and a transfer: