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Quicken Essentials for Mac is Macintosh version of popular Quicken personal finance management software. Software that import qif file - Quicken Interchange Format. Programs supporting the exension qif on the main platforms Windows, Mac, Linux or mobile.
I'm having the same issue. And it's messing up my budget. I added a savings item in my budget (in my case, $1400 per month to my two kid's 529 plans). When I transfer the $1400 to the 529 plans from my checking account, the 'Actual' amount for that month in the Budget analysis shows as $0, because, as noted above, transfers out of my checking account and into my 529 plans is a zero sum transfer. I tried to solve this issue by going into the 529 plans' Settings and selecting 'Exclude from Reports' so that the deposit into the 529 plan no longer show up in the reports leaving only the withdrawal from the checking account to appear.
It should have worked, but it didn't. The 'Actual' amount in the Budget analysis page still shows $0, However, when I click to see the transactions amounting to $0, the transactions are $1400!
So, it worked when you drill into the number, but it didn't work in the overall summary page. This seems more like a bug, because I specifically requested to exclude the 529 account from this report, yet it's still being included in the Budget analysis page, but not when drilling into the specifics of the number. All Quicken has to do is to have the Budget analysis page to properly exclude the accounts which were marked to be excluded. For a mortgage, there is indeed another option for Mac. If you go into 'Edit Loan and Payment Terms', on the 'Bill Reminder' tab, you can choose between 'Payment Total Only', 'Detailed Reminder' and 'No Reminder'. Since I already had a scheduled transaction for the mortgage, I selected no reminder, though I suppose I could have selected total only, and deleted mine. How this is working out is my mortgage loan account balance is being reduced in its register each month by the correct principal amount (currently in the neighborhood of $1,000 principal, $400 interest).
BUT, there is no transfer coming out of checking for that amount, nor the interest amount. Instead, my separate scheduled transaction for the full $1,400, to the Bills - Mortgage Payment category, is continuing to hit every month. This means accounting-wise, I'm not keeping correct track of interest expense, but I don't really care about that. More important to me is budget-wise, it correctly tracks the $1,400 total mortgage bill.
Please add the ability to choose whether to include or exclude transfers in budgets, like in other versions of Quicken. At the moment, you can categorize transfers but they do not show up in budgets. This feature should also allow control of that and override it as needed. (If you find this feature helpful, please be sure to click 'VOTE' above to increase the count of this post and therefore its visibility to other users and to the developers.) If you do not click VOTE at the top of each one, your vote will NOT be counted! Click 'Follow' at the top if you want to receive notifications of any replies to this thread. Probably don't have to explain that using one's gross income, less apportionments to 401k and automatic savings, then covering college tuition and housing which are funded from a 529, to develop a simple budget in Quicken is. Impossible without account transfers.
I see that this was 'on the long term roadmap' two years ago. Baffled by the Quicken dev work done during that time on weird, esoteric, niche audience features that have been done in the meantime. While this previously available capability has not been put at the top of the list. This feature, when implemented, must be flexible enough to enable/disable transfer from the budget on an account-by-account basis. (Since being able to select accounts for budgets is a feature request Quicken has not yet implemented, I suspect it's why including/'excluding transfers has also not yet been implemented.) Here's why: a transfer to pay your credit card bill should NOT be included int he budget, because you already have all the individual expense transactions in your credit account reflected in the budget.
But a transfer to pay down a loan SHOULD be included i your budget, since it's money coming out of your cash flow every month. And you might want the option to include transfers to a retirement or non-retirement savings account in your budget, too, if you set a plan for savings and want to make sure you stick to it. So making ALL transfers show up in the budget won't work; it has to be implemented so it can be done on an account-by-account basis. In older versions of Quicken, you could select in your budget to include certain specific total loan payments - like mortgage and car payment. In my budget, I need to include the total loan payment and not just the interest / taxes etc. If they could do it before, they can certainly figure out how to do it again.
It worked beautifully. In Mac 2019, I am having to exclude the non-principal amounts from my budget, and manually include the total loan payment amounts and transfers to savings and non-interest (like care credit) loans. Making a budget in Quicken now is useless. Come on Quicken, listen to your long-term users.
We NEED this, and we've been asking for it back for years. And YES, I voted! Betty, it's not that they can't figure out how to do it, it's simply (or perhaps not so simply) a matter of juggling their limited personnel/time resources to address a lot of things users are asking them to change/fix/enhance with the program. Because we all use Quicken differently, what's important to you may not be to someone else, and visa versa. For instance, another user says they don't use budgeting, but they can't migrate off the old Quicken 2007 because Quicken 2019 still doesn't have a report where the user can specify what data to put in rows and columns, for such things as payroll or rental property management.
You might say the reports are fine for you as-is, but you need to be able to generate an accurate budget. No one is wrong, and Quicken knows they need to tackle both issue. It's just a matter of which they do first. That could depend on how much time they estimate it will take, which of the engineers need to be involved in modifying different parts of the program, the number of users they think are affected, etc. In this case, the product manager acknowledged late last year that this is near the top of the list of user requests, and that they will tackle this. (It's rare for them to state something they will definitely include in a future release, so that's hugely encouraging.) He explained that they needed to wait for the overhaul of the Quicken Mobile App, which is developed by a different team at Quicken and needs to work with budgets from both the Quicken Windows and Quicken Mac programs, before they started work on modifying Quicken Mac budgets.
The mobile app work was completed a few months ago, so there's therefore reason to expect this will show up sometime in 2019; unfortunately, there's no way to know exactly when. I hear what you are saying. I went to Quicken Mac, kicking and screaming, only after I got tired of technical issues running a virtual Windows system on my MAC. The ONLY reason I did this was to keep running Quicken Deluxe for Windows. At times I really miss my QDW that I ran for many, many years. Losing the ability for the budget to include/exclude transfers was a major reason I took so long.
There were a lot of other things I liked better in QDW than QM. I acknowledge that there have been some nice improvements in QM and that I have also been able to adjust to the major differences between how QDW vs QM displays information. However, I really miss this feature! I am so glad to see this post as I am trying (again) to migrate from Quicken for Windows to Quicken for Mac. Every effort to this point has been a complete disappointment and I have ended up continuing to use the Windows versions. Really tired of maintaining a Windows virtual machine on my Mac for the sole purpose of running Quicken.
So here I am again trying with the latest iteration of Quicken for Mac. It is definitely an improvement on previous versions but the inability to track transfers in categories (despite the fact that the Quicken Help section indicates that you can) is a significant liability.
There is no provision for tracking savings in a budget and at least tracking transfers to brokerage or other savings account in the budget would be a good start. Changing the category of a transfer (linked or otherwise) does not make it appear in either category reports or the budget. Please implement this feature. It seems from Quicken's own help file that it was intended to function this way but clearly it does not as I have tried over and over again to modify existing transfer transactions or set up new ones. Nothing shows up as anything but 'Other Transactions: Transfers between accounts' at the bottom of category reports which do not appear in budgets or other reports. And yes, I voted. I also highly recommend that you browse through the IDEAS section of this forum and VOTE for the request of each of the missing features to be added back into Quicken for Mac.to help direct the priorities of the developers.
To do that, I suggest you read this FAQ on how to filter the IDEAS to just show the ones for the Mac version, then VOTE to your heart's content: The following are some of the many feature requests you will find:. and many others. Click on each link above, then be sure to scroll down each page, as some contain lists of related features.
Then VOTE on EACH IDEA separately that you are interested in. If you do not click VOTE at the top of the page of each feature, your vote will NOT be counted for THAT specific feature! (If you find this reply helpful, please be sure to click 'Like', so others will know, thanks.). @Les are you by any chance using automated backups using the QM2007 Preferences? It looks like you are still using the HFS+ drive format. Users have reported having problems with automated backsups using APFS drive format. Your feedback would be helpful.
BTW, please continue any discussion regarding compatibility between QM2007 and High Sierra here: so all that info and replies can be captured in only one place. (If you find this reply helpful, please be sure to click 'Like', so others will know, thanks.). Transfers should have the ability to show up in the budget.
I understand that the money going from one's paycheck into a savings account does not change one's net worth. However, when that transfer goes from checking to pay off 'DEBT' such as a HELOC which shows up under 'DEBT', it should also be able to show up in the budget. Paying off a HELOC is paying off a debt.
Paying off a debt is an expense that comes out of our checking. To most people, there is not difference between that and paying their utility bills. It should at least be an option to include transfers in the budget.
I'm having the same issue. And it's messing up my budget. I added a savings item in my budget (in my case, $1400 per month to my two kid's 529 plans). When I transfer the $1400 to the 529 plans from my checking account, the 'Actual' amount for that month in the Budget analysis shows as $0, because, as noted above, transfers out of my checking account and into my 529 plans is a zero sum transfer. I tried to solve this issue by going into the 529 plans' Settings and selecting 'Exclude from Reports' so that the deposit into the 529 plan no longer show up in the reports leaving only the withdrawal from the checking account to appear. It should have worked, but it didn't. The 'Actual' amount in the Budget analysis page still shows $0, However, when I click to see the transactions amounting to $0, the transactions are $1400!
So, it worked when you drill into the number, but it didn't work in the overall summary page. This seems more like a bug, because I specifically requested to exclude the 529 account from this report, yet it's still being included in the Budget analysis page, but not when drilling into the specifics of the number. All Quicken has to do is to have the Budget analysis page to properly exclude the accounts which were marked to be excluded.
No reporting capabilities of transfers. No budgeting capabilities for transfers. This is a real deal breaker for me and makes it difficult for me to use Quicken Mac efficiently and really gives me doubts about continuing with this software.
What I've done is pretty much eliminated transfer entries altogether.which eliminates the feature of 'double entry'. I just categorize everything (including categorizing some transactions as 'Excluded Amount') in every account register. Then I set up whatever report to not include the category 'Excluded Amount' in the report. Very rudimentary and very non-efficient.
Don't know what the Quicken programmers were thinking by not putting this in any of the past four versions. Not sure I want to sink any more money into Quicken, as their development of Quicken Mac isn't fast enough to meet my needs. Considering that Quicken for Mac was just about dead a few years ago (remember the Quicken 2007 mess?) and has always been wildly underserved compared to Windows, I think the new team has done a great job bringing it back from the ashes.
On top of that, migrating away from Inuit to their own cloud platform was probably a massive undertaking to get right. From a new feature perspective, they added Loan support which I have found extremely useful (vs. Tracking as a debt/liability). Personally I am more confident in the future of Quicken for Mac now than I was when it was run by Intuit. I had 100% given up on Quicken until this year when I found they had all of the essentials I needed to track my finances in a system I am comfortable with. Do I wish I had parity with Windows today?
Did they fall behind competition? But in reality, we are fretting over a feature they will no doubt add and the team has released far more feature updates per year then Inuit ever did. Just my two cents!
![Does quicken for mac provide for transfers free Does quicken for mac provide for transfers free](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125449268/123752779.jpg)
Good point on the Mac development effort, which was likely large after years of neglect by Intuit. It could be a matter of prioritizing development, with migration activities taking a priority as Mattyv123 says. But Quicken began separating from Intuit late last year, and we've gone through previous years of Quicken for Mac updates without this fundamental, essential budgeting capability. To me, it's like releasing a spreadsheet program without the ability to add two numbers.
Sure, it's released, and it may have a lot of features, and a lot of work went in to it, but it's not useful in practice. There is a way to account for transfers in Quicken Mac 2017. First, you'll need to make sure you have selected 'Category' and 'Transfer' from the 'Columns' setting at the bottom of each Quickern register. You should now see the Category AND Transfer columns in the registers. Then, you can categorize a 'transfer' transaction as a 'normal' category AND as a transfer. For example, my mortgage payment amount consists of the mortgage principal and the mortgage interest. The mortgage principal is a transfer to the mortgage loan liability account, which in turns reduces the balance there.
The way you NOW look at how Quicken Mac handles this is to put the mortgage loan account in square brackets in the category field. INSTEAD, use the category as 'Mortgage Principal' and in the transfer field put in MyMortgageLoan.the name of your Quicken Loan account enclosed in square brackets (or select from the drop down list). Same for Retirement Benefits from a 401K or an IRA. Categorize the transaction in the checking account as a category of 'Retirement Benefits' AND in the transfer field put in My401K. In order to do this however, your Mortgage Loan account must NOT be automatically downloaded and the Bill Reminder must be turned off in the Loan settings. Now, for the fun part. You'll now notice that if you select the Banking Sub-Group heading, your graph and amount of cash flow is correct.
There is no 'incorrect' amount because before the mortgage principal amounts cancel each other and the cash flow is therefore over-inflated. If you create a month to date or year to date report in New Reports (make sure you use NEW REPORTS by category), you can filter the accounts and categories for that report.
ONLY include your cash flow accounts.such as cash, checking and credit card accounts. DO NOT include your Mortgage Loan account or retirement accounts. You'll notice you now have a perfect report for the actual cash flow of your funds.in and out. Then, you can also create a budget.because instead of categorizing things as a transfer, you're categorizing them with a 'normal' category and including the transfer in another field.
Therefore the Mortgage Principal is now accounted for in the budget, since it's a category. And you can still create reminders for your mortgage payment or retirement transfer to checking or whatever transfer you created.because you're categorizing the transaction as well as designating a transfer. Try it.this works so well I'm shocked no one else has recommended this. The only downside is that your loan is now a manual loan.and you'll need to enter the actual principal and interest amounts manually. But your amortization schedule is apparent in the loan account section, so it's easy to see what those amounts are.
Here's a screenshot of the Checking account register showing the mortgage payment split: Notice the Category has both Mortgage Principal and Mortgage Interest.but the Transfer column is only for the Mortgage Principal amount and designates my mortgage account in Quicken. And of course, the mortgage account shows the transfer from my checking account for the mortgage principal. Now, as I said before, it's important in the report created to ONLY include your cash flow accounts, such as cash, checking and credit cards. If you leave ALL accounts included, the Mortgage Principal amounts will cancel each other out. But since you only use the cash flow accounts I mentioned, only 'one side' of the transfer will be included.
Ok, so this is not working for me. I tried by removing automatic payments and bill reminders and manually entering in entries as you recommended.
I even created a new Loan account with the same results. I must be missing something. I have created a 'Mortgage' category with 'Mortgage Interest' and 'Mortage Principal' as sub categories. For the ledger entry, I crated a split with each of the above two sub-categories, but used the 'Transfer' field to transfer to the loan account. When I am in the budget view, only the interest is being counted in the numbers.
The weird part is when I click on the 'Mortgage' category, both the interest and mortgage values appear in the report and give the proper sum total! Are you sure that you are able to get your principal amount to appear in the budgets view? See screenshots below. After opening up a budget in QM (and being reminded why I despise Quicken's budgeting functions and don't use them - I digress), first thing that jumps out is that the budget doesn't permit selecting/deselecting accounts, which is what in turn permits categorized expense transfers to show up in summary reports.
Bottom line is that, unless the Mac team adds some secret sauce, if you can't delimit the transfer account, an expense transaction is going to zero out and therefore remain invisible to QM's reporting engine. As I mentioned upthread, this is a distinct but presumably related issue to income transfers not registering properly in reports or the budget.