Need Help Please! Comparison Reports.

Start using the memo to indicate "Dec-05 payment", "Jan-06 payment", etc.

Then you can run a report only for transactions where the memo includes "05"

Thank you.

But I'm confused. This means that, for *every* transaction (and I have hundreds of them per year), I need to put the year in *every* Memo line.

Also, I'm doing a Comparison report. Therefore, if I limit the search to, say, "2005" in the Memo line, I won't get anything for the comparison period (in this case 2004).

As far as I can tell, Comparison reports don't allow you to limit your search to one period or the other. When you put in a limiter, it's going to apply to (unfortunately) *both* comparison periods.

Or am I missing something?

Create a Credit Card Account for your electric / cable / etc. When the bill is received - record it much like a charge that way the expense will get into the correct period. When you pay the bill - you will offset this new Account. I do this for my Homeowners and Auto Insurance - except my balance is the Initial Bill offset by the monthly payments. Hope this helps....

If you pay your bills by check, simply change the date entered to put it into the right period. It doesn't matter whether you pay December bills in December or January as long as you do it consistently.

The easiest way to fix your history is to determine the fewest number of transactions you need to change. Then simply change the date on file.

With respect to classes, you're obviously not using them properly. They are

*very* useful, especially in reports.

Sorry, Fred, but I have to disagree with you on two points:

1) I mentioned, in my original post, the solution you proposed. However, it bothers me that, after paying $xxx dollars for financial software, I have to do a "work around" and screw up the order of my checks (#924 on 1/10/05 and #918 on 12/21/04) to get a meaningful comparison;

2) Secondly, pertaining to Classes, I don't think I'm "obviously not using them properly". If you can tell me how to use Classes in a *Comparison* report so that I can easily ascertain how much I spent on Category "Electricity" in 2004 (Class "2004") compared to Category "Electricity" in

2005 (Class "2005"), I will be in your debt for the rest of my natural born days.

Once again, I'm talking about *comparison reports*.

Thank you.

1. You will need to decide what bothers you more: having checks out of order, or not being able to run proper comparison reports. In any event, there are several solutions: a. you could sort your register by check number, which would then override the date. b. you could make sure that in the future, you always write checks in the month which will allow you to compare your expenses properly. This won't solve your history problems, but will eliminate future ones. c. you could use accrual accounting. Post the bill to an Accounts Payable account on the date it is issued. When you actually pay the bill, post the cheque to Accounts Payable. This way your expenses come from the AP account, rather than the bank account, and will show up in the right month, regardless of when you pay them. d. you could use partial accrual account. Again, you need to set up an Accounts Payable account. For those checks which are in the wrong month, change the category to [Accounts Payable]. Then go to this account, and enter the expense in the correct month. I use this when I want to get expenses in the right year, and don't want to change the date of the check, or more often, the deposit. I manually reconcile the transactions so I know which ones are outstanding.

1. Regarding classes, I wouldn't use them for comparison reporting. In your case, you can easily do comparison reporting by selecting all classes, and specify a date range for the current and previous period. You can also run reports and subtotal them by month or year to compare for more than two periods. As I have been using Quicken since 1990, I can easily run a report which shows me a 15-year history of my cash flow and net worth, all summarized on one sheet of paper.

Thanks, Fred. I appreciate your help.