Community Discussion: How do I edit a newly created category?

A couple of clarifications.

1.) Quicken Business reports/displays normally only exclude non-business transactions from Business reports that report transactions, directly or indirectly - such as the Business > Profit and Loss report, and the Business > Cash Flow report. The Business > Balance Sheet report, on the other hand, does NOT exclude non-business transactions. 2.) Contrary to the 05-13-2021 post by NotACPA, Schedule E and Schedule F transactions are NOT "business transactions" in Quicken. They may be business transactions in the real-world, but they're not "business transactions" in Quicken.

That can pose a sort of catch-22 for users who have real-world Schedule E or Schedule F businesses.

If such a user assigns the proper Schedule E or Schedule F tax line item to their Quicken transactions, those transactions will not appear in Business reports (see #1 above). And while there is a separate group of reports for Schedule E users ("Rental Property" reports) which do include Schedule E transactions (because they only include "rental property transactions"), there is no such report "group" for Schedule F users. The "Rental Property" reports are not nearly as extensive as the "Business" reports - and there are no reports specifically for "Farm" (Schedule F) businesses.

And for both Schedule E and Schedule F users, the ability to use Quicken invoices is limited by the fact that invoices (Customer or Vendor) are always "business transactions".

[My suggestion would be for the Quicken "Home, Business & Rental Property edition to offer the user an option to designate which tax Schedule should be treated as THE "Business" for each Quicken data file. To take advantage of such an option, the user would have to limit each Quicken file to one tax Schedule type business - Schedule C in one file, Schedule E in another file, and Schedule F in yet another file (naturally, the need for more than one Quicken data file would only apply to users with more than one tax Schedule type-of-business). Personally, I would not get my hopes up that this will happen: I don't think there are enough users of the "business" features in Quicken to make such a change economically feasible to Quicken. But there's no reason those with the problem shouldn't make the suggestion to Quicken anyway.]

I have never used the Q canned reports as anything other than a starting point to create my own reports. Q has no idea what I do. Why is it so hard for other users to just create their own reports exactly as they wish? Maybe they are not cut out for being in business.

I think it's almost by definition, that the Quicken business edition is intended for amateurs, so I generally expect the Business edition questions to reflect that. I just wish that those who make demands without knowing what they're talking about would learn to gather evidence before arriving at a conclusion (and recognize when they do not have sufficient evidence to draw an accurate conclusion) - and that those who are not amateurs would think and test before attempting to provide answers. Those are the underlying issues I was thinking about when I began this discussion.

In the referenced Community discussion, it seems clear to me that the original poster - like many Quicken Business edition users - does not understand how Quicken works (or why the Quicken Business edition works as it does). While I would agree that it may not be intuitive to grasp how Quicken deals with Business reports (among other non-intuitive Quicken treatments); my complaints are with those who are inexperienced and who jump to conclusions, but even more so with those who have used the Business edition and, apparently, are not willing to spend a little time determining how the Business edition deals with the specific situations reported by other users. In other words: refrain from pretending to provide an answer when you have not attempted to test it out. The referenced Community discussion has both types of users.

There does seem to be a certain laziness exhibited by some users; who prefer to dump their problems on the Quicken Community without having spent much, if any, time seeking a solution on their own. Some problems are not that difficult to solve when enough effort is expended. I believe this issue falls into the realm of cost-vs-benefit: Quicken Community users pay nothing to ask a question ... no matter how trivial it is, or how easily answered it might be by the person asking the question. There is nothing to encourage users to look for answers on their own: it's a win-win for the lazy. [Even when a user can't figure out an answer by themselves, they do themselves a favor when they look for one - trial and error is a good teacher, and having done some exploring, they are often in a better position to create a good problem description and to provide useful information to those who try to help them.]

I have posted multiple times how easy it is for a user to create their own default reports - few appear to have appreciated the knowledge.

There is one element in this (and the Community) discussion that does not lend itself to users easily creating "their own reports exactly as they wish" (unless the user wishes to ignore the Quicken definition of (and treatment of) "business transactions). It would be extremely more difficult for users to customize Quicken reports to guarantee that they represent genuine "business" activity; than it is to allow Quicken to define and select "business transactions" for business reports.