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Posted by John Pollard on March 26, 2007, 10:44 am
Please log in for more thread options Jay Goldberg wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Mar 2007 19:29:01 +0000, John Pollard wrote:
>
>> Jay Goldberg wrote:
>>> I'm just starting with Quicken, and was wondering
>>> howcome when you select multiple transactions in the
>>> register, Quicken doesn't show the sum of the
>>> transactions in the bottom status bar like Excel does?
>>>
>>> As part of a class action settlement with
>>> Visa/Mastercard, I was required to find the amount of
>>> all foreign transactions on a recent trip.
>>>
>>> I had to recategorize the selected transactions into a
>>> one time use category (from "Vacation" to "CC
>>> Settlement") and run a report and get the sum of those
>>> transactions. Then I had to put them all back as
>>> "Vacation" and remove the "CC Settlement" category I
>>> had created.
>>>
>>> Is there a better way to do this?
>>
>> There are probably several other ways to tackle the
>> problem.
>>
>> If you could recategorize, chances are you could have
>> selected on the existing category and coupled that with
>> a date range to have selected the pertinent transactions
>> without changing the category.
>
> This would be all well and good except, as I'm sure you
> know, Visa and MC transactions post days later, making
> travel and non-travel expenditures overlap all over the
> place at the beginning and end of a trip.
>
>> You could also have created a dummy account, then once
>> you had selected the appropriate transactions in the
>> existing account register, used copy/paste to put them
>> in the dummy account ... whose balance would have been
>> the total of just those transactions. You could have
>> deleted the transactions or the entire dummy account
>> after you had your answer.
>
> This seems like a logical thing to do, but a bit of
> work...
>> To kill two birds with one stone (make selecting the
>> transactions for reports easier, and to have a permanent
>> record that those transactions were the ones used in the
>> suit); you could have used Find/Replace to find the
>> appropriate transactions and put some text like "class
>> action transaction" in their Memo field. You could then
>> select on that Memo field text in report Customize
>> dialogs to select only those transactions.
> I like this idea the best, except that functionally one
> is using the memo field to emulate one's own
> categorization system, something it was not intended to
> do, but alas!
I would call if further categorizing your transactions, which is
pretty close to one useful purpose of the memo field. Another
example would be putting the "date of service" in the memo field
for medical services.
I think you could also have used a Quicken "Class" for the
"Class action" transactions.
> Now, of course I know that you are not Intuit and that we
> are at their mercy when it comes to implementing and
> improving features. What I would like to know is whether
> the "Sum of selected in status bar" feature makes sense
> and would be a desirable thing? Often times I am going
> over the register with someone on the phone, and wouldn't
> have the time to recategorize/find/replace whatever. Just
> would be nice to be able to select a group of
> transactions and get a quick total.
I think Intuit does pay attention to user requests. Yours
sounds sensible enough and simple enough to implement, that they
might do it. You lose nothing by submitting the idea to Intuit.
--
John Pollard
First initial underscore Last name at mchsi dot com
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