Delete Obsolete "Required" Categories

Austin@
Austin@ Mac Beta Beta
It would be great if it was possible to delete old, obsolete categories listed as "Required" that were once included in the default set of Quicken categories, but are either no longer are a default category in modern versions of Quicken or have been replaced by new, more specific versions of the same category. For example, when I first started using Quicken there was a default, required category called "Investments" with a subcategory called "ESPP Income." If I were to create a fresh, new Quicken file today, this subcategory would not exist. Rather, under "Investments" there are subcategories for "ESPP Self Income" and "ESPP Self Income (Spouse)". In addition, the new category of "Investments" with all of its subcategories only shows up when you are in an investment account.

The old, outdated "ESPP Income" subcategory is still hanging around and shows up in the category list for all accounts, whether they are investment accounts or not. And even though it is not included as a default category in Quicken now (and even though it is unused), it is still listed as "Required" (from earlier versions of Quicken) and as such cannot be deleted.

Please make it possible to remove these types of old, obsolete categories (as long as they are unused) or to have them be replaced/overwritten with the newer categories when selecting the "Add Default Categories" menu.
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21
21 votes

Reviewed · Last Updated

Comments

  • tmplee
    tmplee Member ✭✭
    edited September 2019
    In general, the categories ought to be able to be tailored any way one wants. I am annoyed, for instance, that there are a whole bunch of investment categories that I don't use and will never use!
  • NotACPA
    NotACPA SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    "and will never use!"
    You can predict the future ... WOW!!! What investment should I buy next?

    Q user since February, 1990. DOS Version 4
    Now running Quicken Windows Subscription, Business & Personal
    Retired "Certified Information Systems Auditor" & Bank Audit VP

  • jacobs
    jacobs SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    edited May 2021
    It certainly is possible for users to know they will never have Employee Stock options or ESPP Income for them or their spouse. And some investors might know they don't do the types of investing that would require Short Sell or Buy to Cover categories.

    But let's not get too far afield from the original request, which was to be able to delete categories not required by current Quicken, which had been required -- yet are unused -- from an older version of Quicken. 
    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • NotACPA
    NotACPA SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    "It certainly is possible for users to know they will never have Employee Stock options or ESPP Income for them or their spouse."
    And neither the user, nor their spouse will EVER change jobs so that the new job as these offered.
    Again, telling the future ... AND rather depressing that they'll NEVER change jobs.

    Q user since February, 1990. DOS Version 4
    Now running Quicken Windows Subscription, Business & Personal
    Retired "Certified Information Systems Auditor" & Bank Audit VP

  • tmplee
    tmplee Member ✭✭
    @jacobs LOL. You essentially responded to @NotACPA the way I was about to. I am 75 and my wife and I are both retired. Neither of us is particularly interested in becoming employed again and because we've saved and invested enough we don't have to. And, yes, it is extremely unlikely we will ever trade options. (One of our stockbrokers uses my wife's portfolio as an example for his younger colleagues of how good an investment principal "buy and hold" is.) In any case, being able to hide, or even delete, categories you aren't using and don't expect to use shouldn't preclude being able to add them back in at a later date. I just looked and there are seven investment categories that we won't use and I don't understand why Buy/Sell (in various flavors) are categories at all — they are actions. But if they are going to have them as categories, where is IRA distribution as a category? (Don't refer me to the threads about IRA distributions. I found them and tried to understand them and couldn't make sense out of them on a first reading.)
  • jacobs
    jacobs SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    NotACPA said:
    "It certainly is possible for users to know they will never have Employee Stock options or ESPP Income for them or their spouse."
    And neither the user, nor their spouse will EVER change jobs so that the new job as these offered.
    Again, telling the future ... AND rather depressing that they'll NEVER change jobs.
    @NotACPA Umm, you have heard of this thing called retirement, haven't you, where some people cease working for the rest of their lives? ;)
    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • jacobs
    jacobs SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    I would not delete this idea. I can see no logical reason that Quicken users should not be able to delete categories which were required by older, defunct versions of the software but which are not required categories in the current software. I would guess the developers are probably not even aware this problem exists, and they will only become aware of it if this idea is passed to them.
    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • I'm retired and many categories are irrelevant. I voted yes.
  • Austin@
    Austin@ Mac Beta Beta
    I would also ask that this idea not be deleted. I created it out of frustration that I couldn't delete obsolete categories that were required at some point for Quicken to function, but have been replaced with new standard required categories, making the old ones useless, yet still unable to be deleted.
  • UKR
    UKR SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    Worst case, you can always hide unneeded or unwanted built-in categories.
    But, I also think that it should be possible for users to modify, repair or delete built-in categories.
    If a situation arises where a built-in category was previously deleted or never created at all, but is now needed to correctly record a specific transaction, Quicken should be smart enough to add the missing category on the fly and then continue with the transaction.
    There have been other discussions about the need to repair damaged built-in categories, e.g., _IntInc missing the tax attributes. This still is something that needs to be done, too.
  • jacobs
    jacobs SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    edited May 2021
    UKR said:
    Worst case, you can always hide unneeded or unwanted built-in categories.
    This is a Quicken Mac thread, and there is no way to hide and unhide categories in Quicken Mac. (There is a separate idea thread for that: click here to vote for functionality to allow categories to be hidden.) Nor a way to delete a required built-in category.
    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • JayBugs
    JayBugs Member ✭✭✭✭
    Adding a post to keep this alive. I've got lots of old 'required' categories due to a Windows import of data that are dups of the newer more well setup Mac categories...yet I can't merge them into the new categories and get rid of the old ones. Please fix this.
    -Jay
  • jacobs
    jacobs SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    @JayBugs  I'm glad you mentioned a related key point which I hope the developers will some day address: the inability currently to merge a non-required category into a required sub-category of Investments. I understand if there are some categories hard-wired to the tax report that they don't want users to delete, but there should be no reason to prevent users from merging a non-required category they created into a required one.

    I, like many Quicken Mac users, migrated from Quicken 2007, which used a very different set of categories. So I have 18 investment categories from Quicken 2007, some used and some not used, and I'd like to merge those old categories (or at least those which were used) into the required investment categories used by Quicken Mac. But I can't. Category merges must be at the same level (e.g. category to category, sub-category to sub-category), so the first step to merge my old Quicken 2007 "•Realized Gain" category into modern Quicken Mac's category of Investments:Realized Gain/Loss, I would need to make them both sub-categories of Investments, and then merge them. But if I try to drag the old category into the Investment category, I'm blocked because "The 'Investments' category is used internally by Quicken and cannot be modified."

    So I'm permanently stuck with duplicate investing categories, one set which came from Quicken 2007 and one set required by modern Quicken Mac.
    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • JayBugs
    JayBugs Member ✭✭✭✭
    Even more specifically, I’d like Quicken to k ow the old investment and other required categories from all earlier and alternative platform versions of quicken and have a single function to merge the old categories into the current matching Mac Quicken categories and then delete the old ones. Why should I need to manually figure out what matches and clean up all this even after Quicken allows deleting of old required categories?

    Handling well of older (Q2007) and Windows file import should be better. I have all these _Div and _Foo categories from...who knows when or which version. (My Quicken file started in the 90s...)
    -Jay
  • Wuhrman
    Wuhrman Member ✭✭
    I'll add my agreement to most of the above. I've been using Quicken since the 1990s, upgrading from time to time, cleaning out older transactions from time to time, but essentially using the same file (because of the custom categories I've made up). One day, I "tested" what a download from a payroll tax program would look like, and it added a whole host of tax and other deduction categories that I've never used and never been able to get rid of. And that's something like 20 YEARS. Shouldn't be any block to my deleting them.
  • Paul13
    Paul13 Member ✭✭
    This merge non required category into required category needs to be addressed. It is very annoying to long time quicken users who moved to qmac.
  • jacobs
    jacobs SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    This Idea post needs more votes if it is to be pushed in front of the developers for consideration. The current vote total (15 as of this writing) is not high enough for this to be sent to the developers. If you're reading this and wish you could delete old required categories from a prior version of Quicken, or merge them with the current required categories in Quicken, please scroll to the top of this page, locate the yellow box under the first post, and click the arrow to add your vote.
    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • tmplee
    tmplee Member ✭✭
    I have to chuckle. I couldn't remember whether I'd voted or not, so I went to vote and the count went from 15 to 14! I assume that's because if you've already voted and try to vote again it interprets that as meaning you changed your mind or voted by accident. Anyway, I "voted again" and restored the vote that presumably I'd already made.
  • jacobs
    jacobs SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    @tmplee  Yes, exactly! The way to tell if you've voted is the shade of the arrow: dark gray means you haven't voted, light grey (as in "greyed out" means you have voted) --but if you're not sure, do as you did and click the arrow; if the vote total goes up, all's well, but if it goes down just click it again to restore your vote. Although it's not Quicken's fault, this platform (Vanilla) has some really stupid interface design elements!
    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • roisenp1950
    roisenp1950 Member ✭✭
    QMac Version 6.8.2 (Build 608.44865.100) Investments have a lot of "Required" categories under Investments. They are NOT deletable.
    Up until I created a "Taxable IRA Withdrawl" category. When I click on it is shows which IRA form it is realated to. This shows up as REQUIRED categories now. But it is DELETABLE. I did not give it the "Required" designation and I have no idea where it came from but the fact that is deletable appears to go against the normal expectation I have gathered from QMac use way back from 2007 verion. The tech I spoke to was mistified. Any ideas? Not a huge issue by any means but I do not like it when I do not understand the "rules" surrounding "Required" categories.
  • jacobs
    jacobs SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    I see this, too. But if you have a category called Personal Income:Taxable IRA Withdrawal, this is not a category you created; it's a Quicken-created category. I verified this by creating a new, blank Quicken file with no transactions, and this category is present. I have no idea why it is labeled as Required yet lets you delete it. 
    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993