Improvements to the new Dashboard [Edited]

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PennyFoolish
PennyFoolish Member ✭✭
edited October 2023 in Product Enhancements
I like the new Dashboard, but I feel it could be so much more. more tiles - Upcoming bills, budget, etc. And more controls on the ones there - like the controls on the reports, where you can select accounts, payees, tags. Top Spending Payees would be much more useful to me if I could filter out opening balances, credit card and loan payments, transfers.
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  • jacobs
    jacobs SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    edited February 2023
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    @PennyFoolish There are multiple existing Idea threads to add additional functionality to the new Home screen Dashboard. The Home Dashboard was introduced in version 6.10 as an eventual successor to the original Home Overview. The Dashboard has seen multiple iterations since then — and the product manager has said there will be more features coming in future releases. You should add your vote for the ideas you'd like to see implemented.
    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • LagunaPhil
    LagunaPhil Member ✭✭
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    The Dashboard "Spending by Category" card does not include major categories like taxes which make this chart useless in understanding where my money is spent. In my case, 30% of expenses shown in the "Category summary by Year" report are not included in the dashboard pie chart. I was told by the online help desk that this card is provided by an out of house company, that the categories are fixed and Quicken has no ability to change them. Further, I see no way to generate a pie chart in the reports section. Sure, I can export the data to my spreadsheet program and generate a graph but this should be available within the Quicken program. I believe it was in the past.

  • jacobs
    jacobs SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
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    The Dashboard "Spending by Category" card does not include major categories like taxes which make this chart useless in understanding where my money is spent. In my case, 30% of expenses shown in the "Category summary by Year" report are not included in the dashboard pie chart.

    Hmmm, that doesn't seem right. My Home Dashboard Spending by Category chart includes taxes. In fact, there is another post today or yesterday from a user complaining that they wanted to be able to exclude taxes because that one category was such a large part of their total expenses.

    If you're not seeing taxes, or other expenses, I'm wondering whether you have the card set to include All Accounts. In the past, it always did, but with the latest version, you can now configure each cardio include the accounts you want. Click on the circular ••• icon in the upper right of the Spending by Category card, click Customize, click the Accounts tab, and see if it is set to All Accounts.

    I was told by the online help desk that this card is provided by an out of house company, that the categories are fixed and Quicken has no ability to change them.

    Well that doesn't make sense. The Spending by Category card is derived from the categories used in your own data. Some categories may have been auto-categorized, but you're always free to select your own categories. The only card I Can think of which is based largely on data provided by a third-party company is the Investing Dashboard Asset Allocation card, where the seven asset classes are provided by an outside company and cannot be changed.

    Further, I see no way to generate a pie chart in the reports section… this should be available within the Quicken program. I believe it was in the past.

    The Dashboards have charts, but reports do not. And they haven't over the past 10 years in the era of the "modern" Quicken Mac. (The legacy Quicken Mac 2007 program did allow chart generation.) The good news, is that the developers have stated that this is a Planned feature (meaning they've agreed to do it and assigned it time on their development schedule for implementation); we just don't know when this — or any other feature requests now marked as "Planned" — will arrive.

    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • LagunaPhil
    LagunaPhil Member ✭✭
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    Thank you very much. Your comments enabled me to further trouble shoot this issue. Here is where things stand: 1) the problem appears to be caused by the way I handle tax and charitable contributions from my investment accounts. Dummy entries in my checking account work as expected 2) Pie chart on the Overview tab (doesn’t provide all the time frame options and will be  dropped in a future release) works correctly 3) these entries also show correctly in the reports generated in the Reports section.


    I am retired and most of my income comes from distributions from my TIAA retirement account. Tax payments and charitable contributions are also taken from this account. I want Quicken to provide an overall picture of where I spend my money so I manually enter tax and contribution payments as “Misc expenses” and update the total account balance to sync with TIAA. I suspect something about how the dashboard pie chart handles such entries is at the root of my problem.


    Well at least the Overview pie chart meets my needs until it is dropped.

  • jacobs
    jacobs SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
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    I'm not following what you're doing. Why are you recording "Misc. expenses"?

    Do you have a TIAA account in your Quicken? When you have tax payments and contributions, you would want to be recording them as transactions in the TIAA account as Type=Payment/Deposit, using the appropriate categories for taxes and charitable contributions. Entered this way, I've verified that these expense transactions do show up in the Income & Expense and Spending by Category dashboard cards, exactly as you'd expect them to (as long as the card is customized to include your TIAA Account).

    If you could share a screenshot or more detail about how you are recording these payments, we should be able to figure out why your transactions aren't being included in the dashboard cards.

    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • LagunaPhil
    LagunaPhil Member ✭✭
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    I have experimented with downloading TIAA transactions and conclude that it provides too much detail yet requires too much manual manipulation for my needs. I will continue with my manual approach to tracking the total value of this account, and with your help, I now see tax and contributions reflected in the pie chart. Thanks so much for your help with this problem.

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