Transaction Report by Payee - Possible to not show category breakouts?

@MauryJ Okay, there are a few issues here…

[EDITED to correct incorrect information I initially posted]

It is a frustrating shortcoming in Quicken Mac that you can't print or export transaction information without the split lines.

You can export register transactions — not a Transaction Report, but a register export — to a spreadsheet but each transaction with splits shows only the split lines, not the total transaction amount. If you have only a handful of splits, you can do work in the spreadsheet to combine them back into a single transaction, but if you ave more than a handful, it's too painful and time-consuming.

to export register transactions, select the range of transactions you want in your register (click the first, scroll and Shift-click the last, so they're all highlighted), and select File > Export > Register Transactions to CSV File. In the dialog box, be sure to select Export=Selected Transactions Only.

Open the CSV file and you'll initially you have the same problem: each split line for transactions is its own row in the spreadsheet. You can create a new row and sum the split amounts, saving the actual amount rather than a formula. Then sort the spreadsheet by the third column, and all the split lines will be sorted together; select and delete those rows, and what's left is an actual check register, one line per transaction. But again, this is only viable if you manually re-combine splits into a single transaction, making this viable only if you desperately need a check register spreadsheet.

For this reason, there's an Idea thread (feature request) for being able to generate a report of transactions without split lines. Please add your vote and copy-and-past your comments there:

(To add your vote: Click the "View Post" link, and then look for the yellow box under the first post with the vote counter; click the little dark grey arrow under the counter to register your vote.)

I also wanted to touch on something you said above about how you enter your credit card data. You wrote: "if I pay Visa $1300 on check #3189, and I categorized the expenses from that transaction I could have 9 categories in that split." That does work, and perhaps it works best for you. But it's not the optimal way to use Quicken for credit cards. The way most users do it, you'd have a separate account in Quicken for that Visa credit card. In that account, you would capture every credit card transaction; you can download from your credit card company or enter them manually. By recording each transaction, you get a number of benefits: you accurately capture the the actual transaction date of each charge in your records, you can enter memo information about any purchase, you can have splits for any purchase, you see how much you owe at any time in the left sidebar balance. When you pay the credit card bill, you have a simple entry with no splits: enter the payment in your bank account and for the category you use a transfer to the Visa credit card account.

Finally, you said "reconcile is of no help", and I'm curious why. Reconcile should, in fact, allow you to do the exact comparison process you need in order to find a discrepancy, without the need to construct spreadsheets to compare. If your balance is correct as of the prior month, then enter the new balance and date and go to the Reconcile screen. If you've downloaded transactions from your bank, they have blue checkmarks, but if you want to compare Quicken side-by-side with your bank statement, you can click "Mark All as Uncleared" to remove the blue checkmarks. Now, with your bank statement in hand, go down the bank statement one line at a time, clicking the Clr checkbox in Quicken for each item. Along with way, you may find a wrong amount in Quicken, which you can correct, or an item on the statement which is missing from Quicken, so you can enter it. When you reach the end of the statement and marking items cleared in Quicken, the top of the reconcile screen should show a $0 difference, and you can click Finish to turn all those blue checkmarks into green reconciled checkmarks. I do this every month for both my checking account and my credit card accounts, and it works perfectly to lead my to any mistakes I've made in Quicken and matching the real-world account when I'm done. So I'm curious why you said "reconcile is of no help", since what you're doing is a manual reconciliation between Quicken and your checking account.