Community Discussion: Using category groups in reports

Using category groups in reports

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The original poster is unable to find how to utilize Quicken "Category Groups" in Quicken reports.

One problem may be that the op is, " ... looking for a report where the group is listed as one of the columns." I don't believe any Quicken reports offer Category Group as a column.

But that does not mean that Category Group is not available for (some) Quicken reports. The place to look is the "Organization" drop down on the Display tab in the report Customize dialog.

Not all reports have an Organization dropdown, and not all Organization dropdowns include Category Group as a choice.

I can find several Quicken reports that do allow Organization by Category Group:

- Banking > Banking Summary

- Banking > Cash Flow

- Banking > Cash Flow Comparison

- Spending > Current Budget

- Spending > Historical Budget For users that have Quicken Business features:

- Business > Profit and Loss Statement

- Business > Profit and Loss Comparison

It's possible I missed a few; I'll leave it to the very interested to hunt for more.

I have subsequently discovered that the above statement, while technically correct, is somewhat misleading.

There there is no way to select "category group" as a report column in any Quicken report I could find, but it is possible to get a few Quicken reports that will display the category group name in columns (mostly the Quicken Cash Flow reports).

- Reports > Banking > Cash Flow

- Reports > Banking > Cash Flow by Tag

- Reports > Business > Cash Flow

- Reports > Business > Profit and Loss Statement

- Reports > Rental Property > Cash Flow

When customizing those reports, there is no Column choice for Category Group. But when Category is selected as the Column choice, AND Organization "Category Group" is selected: each column header will contain both the Category Group name and the Category name, and an additional column should be present for each Category Group, to display the Category Group subtotal.

I find the above reports very busy, often hard to read, when "Organized" by Category Group, with Category as the column - the impact of that busyness gets worse the more categories are selected for the report. And in a few cases (which I did not pursue), the Category Group subtotals were missing. I think a report organized this way will have limited value (*), and, when chosen. would be most useful with only a small number of categories (or category groups) selected.

[ (*) As noted in my initial post in this discussion, there are quite a few Quicken reports that can display Category Group ... in rows. Given the potential for a significant number of category groups/categories in a given Quicken file; I believe displaying category groups/categories by row is generally a more useful presentation. The readability of that format suffers much less from having a large number of category groups/categories.]