Community Discussion: Ability to excluded [sic] a particular transaction from any Quicken report

Ability to excluded [sic] a particular transaction from any Quicken report

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I agree with the comment in that discussion that this would be significantly more complicated/costly to implement than its benefit would warrant.

But there are other ways to accomplish the goal (though it's possible that no existing method will work for EVERY Quicken report).

As noted by one poster in the referenced discussion, you can use a Tag for the purpose: create a Tag named "Exclude", for example; and deselect that Tag in the reports you create.

Some reports do not offer the ability to choose Tags (see Investment Income, for example), so an approach other than using a Tag might prove more versatile.

Quicken reports have the ability to identify text in a few transaction fields, and condition the use of transactions in the report based on the text found in those fields. The process is called "Matching" and the fields available can be Payee, Category, Tag and Memo. For Investing reports, the Matching capability may not exist, or it may only exist for the memo field (as in the Investment Income report, for example).

Since Memo is a free form text field with no link to any master list, it is a good candidate for the desired capability.

For starters, decide on an approach to employ to identify transactions that you might want to include/exclude from Quicken reports. My approach is to use two pound signs (##) followed immediately by the word "exclude" (as in "##exclude"). The idea is to pick something that will not conflict with real text that you might want in the memo field. To make the criteria even less likely to be confused with wanted text, you might surround your chosen key-word with a pair of pound signs (##exclude##, for example). [A pound sign is but one possible character to use to help insure the desired text is unique to your purpose; any other character or characters in any combination of your choice should also work.]

To exclude transactions from a report, enter the keyword text in the memo field of the transactions to be excluded; then, Customize the report, and on one of the appropriate tabs (Payees, Categories, or Tags), for my specific example, enter the following in the "Matching Memo contains:" field: "~##exclude".

The resulting report should not use any transaction that contain "##exclude" anywhere in its memo field (even if that text is in the middle of other text - though I believe there must be a space before and after the key-word text). If you expect to use the report again, Save it.

[To see all of the Quicken Matching criteria:

- Open a Quicken Banking report (for example)

- Click the Customize button

- Then click the Payees (or Categories or Tags) tab

- In the lower left corner, click the blue circle with the white question mark in the middle

- In the resulting Help display, click on the name of one of the tabs mentioned above ("Payees tab", "Categories tab", or "Tags tab")

- In the resulting screen, click "Matching"

- In the resulting message, click on the blue link, "criteria"

- In item #5, click on "How do I enter match information?"

- In the resulting screen, open each of the items that has a right-pointing arrowhead to its left ("Match character is: ~ (tilde)", for example) ]

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John Pollard
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