Quicken is the most popular financial software package, on both the Windows and Mac platforms. It has far less competition as far as Mac users go, as second place Microsoft Money doesn't have a Mac. Has released version 5.8.1 of Quicken 2018 for Mac, adding a new Help menu item to access Quicken on the Web, where you can enter transactions, assign categories, view spending, track budgets, and more.The financial management app also improves the performance of exporting or copying a report (removing the 5,000 transaction limit); fixes a bug where reports copied to the clipboard.
Quicken produces a bunch of reports. To make sense of what may otherwise become mass confusion, Quicken arranges all its reports into groups: Banking, Comparison, Investing (available when you’ve set up investment accounts), Net Worth & Balances (if you’ve set up any loans or credit card accounts), Spending, Tax, Rental Property (if you’re using Quicken Rental Property Manager), and Business (if you’re using Quicken Home & Business).
To see the reports in one of these groups, click the Reports command and then choose the report group from the Reports menu. As you may know, those little triangles to the right of menu commands tell you that another menu follows.
The figure shows the Banking group of reports. Pretty exciting stuff so far, don’t you think?
To create a Cash Flow report (or any other report, for that matter) on the fly, choose the report from the appropriate menu. To create the Cash Flow report, for example, choose the Reports→Banking→Cash Flow command. Quicken creates the report, placing it in a newly opened window.
The following figure shows the Cash Flow report. After you create a report, you can change the report date or date range by using the text boxes at the top of the report.
To find out what type of information a report includes before you create the report or to preview a report, choose Reports→Reports & Graphs Center. This command displays the Reports and Graphs window.
Select a report group by clicking a topic on the left side and then selecting the report with the report group that you want to create. (The Spending report group is selected and therefore shown. Within the Spending report group, the Spending by Category report is selected and therefore shown.)
You can change the report date or date range by using the text box(es) provided. Click the Show Report button to create the report. If you don’t enter a new range of dates, Quicken assumes that you want to include transactions from the start of the current calendar year through the present date.
Reports that show account balances — such as the Account Balances report, the Net Worth report, the Balance Sheet report, and the Portfolio Value report — don’t need a range of dates because these reports show account balances as of a specific date. In these cases, if you don’t enter a date, Quicken assumes that you want account balances for the current system date from your computer’s internal clock.
You can’t see the entire onscreen version of a report unless your report is very small (or your screen is monstrously large). Press the PgUp and PgDn keys to scroll up and down, and press Tab and Shift+Tab to move right and left. If you’re a mouse lover, you can click and drag various pieces of the scroll bars.
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