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Quicken 2006 new problem: stupid categories

I just upgraded to Quicken 2006 Premiere. The upgrade itself went very smoothly.

There is a new aspect of Quicken that I hate. In all the reports, there are new categories for each bank account, credit card account, brokerage account, and so forth. Thus, when I run a report of spending by category, I see that 14% of my spending went to "Citibank Visa." This is bogus! I didn't spend ANY MONEY on "Citibank Visa!" I spent money on gasoline, restaurants, clothing, and so forth. "Citibank Visa" is simply my mechanism for paying the gas stations, restaurants, etc.

Now I have to go through all the reports and graphs that I care about, and knock out these bogus categories. It is a lot of tedious mouse clicking! I'm concerned that the reports that deal in percentages are now hopelessly distorted.

I really don't understand the theory behind this new Quicken paradigm. Would someone please explain how to correctly use (or knock out) these new automatic categories.

Reply to
David Arnstein
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If you click on Citibank Visa does it break it down more for you?

Reply to
Puppy Lover

Reply to
David Arnstein

snipped-for-privacy@panix.com (David Arnstein) wrote in news:dd3m75$1f9$1 @reader2.panix.com:

Stange, that makes reports pretty much useless.

Reply to
Puppy Lover

First, David, thanks for your reporting on the new product, especially your post on QIF/QFX/OFX. Seems like everyone else in the group who has reported on 2006 has liked it so far. Will be interesting to see what they have to say as more people start responding to your posts (I'm guessing the responses will be slow over the weekend and reach critical mass about mid-morning on Monday). That report thing sounds so stupid that I'm wondering if you're misreading something or clicked some kind of option that made it report that way. Just a guess. I could be wrong; Intuit's done other stupid things before (cf: QIF/QFX/OFX).

Reply to
D Persica

I am really hoping that this is all my fault. It would make me really happy if someone would explain to me how I am misusing Quicken. Then I can correct my mistakes and just use the program.

Reply to
David Arnstein

Don't know if this will help or not. I was looking in my Q2005 program and saw that if you customize a report you get a tabbed screen with the following tabs: Display, Accounts, Categories, Category Groups, Advanced.

If you click on "Categories" you'll see a list of your categories, with checkboxes next to each one. If you go to the end of the list you'll see the accounts are included in that list. I wonder if you uncheck them, will that fix your problem? I realize much may have changed in 2006, so maybe this is not the solution to your problem. If not, I'm sure a 2006 user will probably come up with a solution in the next couple of days.

Reply to
D Persica

Those "categories" are not new; they have been in every version of Quicken that I know of: they represent "transfers". It is possible that Q2006 has a different default preference for displaying those categories than previous versions; it's even possible that one or two reports in Q2006 permit transfers to be listed which did not permit that in previous versions. It's hardly worth anyone's hate. The simplest way to remove all transfer transactions from a report is to "Exclude all" Transfers on the Advanced tab in the Customize dialog.

Reply to
John Pollard

Maybe this is how they do accounting in India? ;-)

Reply to
Steve Larson

I have upgraded to Quicken Premium 2006 and do not observe this behavior. "Citibank VISA" is not a category, it's an account, and it sounds like your reports are showing transfers. You can customize reports not to show this info, though I don't see how simply upgrading from Q2005 to Q2006 would have turned this "feature" on.

Regards,

Margaret

Reply to
Margaret Wilson

Thanks for the help everyone. As far as I can tell, I can get the behavior I want by modifying each report so as to exclude all transfers. This is really a small bit of work on my part. This is the closest thing to a problem that I had while upgrading 2005 -> 2006. So I am very pleased with this upgrade.

Reply to
David Arnstein

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