Chapter 7

Reports, Charts, and Other Cool Tools

In This Chapter

Printing Quicken reports

Using the Reports menu commands

QuickZooming report totals

Sharing information with a spreadsheet

Editing and rearranging report information

Creating a chart

Customizing a report

Quicken enables you to summarize, slice, and dice register and account information in a variety of ways. This chapter describes how to use reports and produce graphs easily. This stuff is much easier to understand if you know how to print a transaction list first (a trick I describe at the end of Chapter 5).

Creating and Printing Reports

After you know how to print checks and transaction lists, all other printing in Quicken is easy, easy, easy.

Printing the facts, and nothing but the facts

The transactions you enter in the transaction-list window or a transaction form and the checks you enter in the Write Checks window determine the information in a report. To print a report, just choose the Reports menu and tell Quicken which report you want to print.

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.

Figure 7-1 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. Figure 7-2 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, shown in Figure 7-3. 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. (In Figure 7-3, 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.

To print the report Quicken shows, follow these steps:

1. Click the Print button.

   Quicken displays the Print dialog box (see Figure 7-4).

   

2. To accept the given specifications — which are almost always fine — just click Print.

   You’ll never guess what happens next: Quicken prints the report!

3. (Optional) To modify the default printing suggestions, use the option buttons and text boxes in the Print dialog box to mix it up a bit and then click Print:
   • Print To: The Print To option buttons let you tell Quicken where it should send the report it produces: to the printer or to a disk file. If you choose to print it to a file, Quicken displays another dialog box, which you use to specify where the print file should be located and what the print file should be named. (I describe how this print-to-file option works in Chapter 5, so I won’t repeat the discussion here. If you want the scoop, refer to the section about printing a check register.)
   • Print Range: Printing a long report? Consider using the Print Range option buttons and text box to specify that you want to print only a specified range of pages. As you might guess (if you’re a clever person), select the Pages option button and then specify the individual pages (separating pages with commas) or the range of pages (separating the start and end page range with a hyphen). The following example page-range specification says, “Hey, Quicken, print pages 1, 4, and 5 and — oh, shoot, I don’t know; maybe the page range 34 through 41 as well.” For this, you would type the following:

     1, 4, 5, 34–41

   • Copies: As you’ve probably guessed, use the Number of Copies text box to tell Quicken to print multiple copies of a report.
   • Page Scaling: For some reports — although not all — you can use the Page Scaling option buttons and text boxes to tell Quicken that it should try to squish the report onto a smaller number of pages. Ever the thoughtful software program, Quicken provides two squishing methods. You can select the Page Scaling Adjust To option button and then enter a squishing percentage. Or you can select the Page Scaling Fit To option button and then specify the report size as a certain number of pages wide by a certain number of pages tall.
   • Print What: The Print What check boxes let you flip-flop between printing a graph and printing a report of the Quicken data you’ve said you want to see a report on. The easiest way to see what this report option does is to select and deselect.
   • Orientation: The Orientation option buttons allow you to specify how Quicken prints a report on pages: vertically (Portrait) or horizontally (Landscape). Again, if you’re confused about this option, experiment by selecting the different buttons.

     Note: When you click a Print dialog box button or enter some value in a Print dialog box field, Quicken redraws the Preview window (on the right) to show you what the report looks like with your new specification.

   • Ink Color: If you use a color printer, Quicken provides Ink Color option buttons, which let you choose whether you want to print the report in expensive colored ink, in cheap black ink, or in grayscale so that you can go all film noir about your finances.
   • Fonts: The two Change Font buttons let you customize the look of your report by changing the font settings (point size, font, style, and so on) of the text used for your report’s header text and body text. I feel kind of like a broken record saying this, but dude, seriously — the way to most easily figure out what these options do is simply to experiment. You can’t foul up or corrupt your Quicken data by fiddle-faddling with the Print dialog box settings. And this is true even if you do something truly visually outrageous.
   • Adjust Margins: Click the Adjust Margins button (upper right) to add margin-setting boxes to the Preview area in the Print dialog box. After Quicken adds these margin-setting boxes, you can change the printed report’s margins by changing the margin settings.

Reviewing standard reports

Tables 7-1 through 7-8 describe the Quicken reports by group. Some of these babies won’t make sense unless you understand how to collect the information that goes into the report, as I describe in Chapters 13, 14, 15, and 16. Also, I should tell you that some of these report groups won’t be visible unless you’ve got the small-business or rental-property-manager version of Quicken.

Table 7-1 Quicken Banking Reports

Table 7-2 Quicken Comparison Reports

Table 7-3 Quicken Investing Reports

Table 7-4 Quicken Net Worth & Balances Reports

Table 7-5 Quicken Spending Reports

Table 7-6 Quicken Tax Reports

Table 7-7 Quicken Rental Property Reports

Table 7-8 Quicken Business Reports

Finding the report you want

Okay, if you’ve read or even skimmed the reports I describe in Tables 7-1 through 7-8, you’re probably a little overwhelmed. Quicken produces a bunch of reports. How do you know which one provides the answers you want? What are you supposed to do? Sift your way through three dozen of these babies?

Fortunately, the answer is no. Quicken also provides something called EasyAnswer reports. In effect, EasyAnswer reports let you identify the question that you want a report to answer. After you identify the question, Quicken produces the appropriate report. Here’s how this all works:

1. Choose the Reports⇒EasyAnswer command.

   The Reports and Graphs Center command appears on the Reports menu.

2. Select the EasyAnswer report category in the Reports and Graphs window.
3. Indicate your question.

   To tell Quicken what your question is, click one of the questions and then use the drop-down list boxes that accompany each question to further refine your question. The “Where did I spend my money during the period … ?” question, for example, lets you pick the period of time you’re asking about: Last Year, Last Month, Current Year, Month to Date, and so on.

4. Click Show Report.

   Quicken produces a report that answers your questions. If you ask, “Where did I spend my money last year?”, Quicken produces a Cash Flow report that summarizes the previous year’s income and expenses by category.

Going to the printing dog-and-pony show

You can do some neat things with the reports you create. I won’t spend a bunch of time talking about these things, but I do want to give you a quick rundown of some of the most valuable tricks.

Got a question about a number? Just zoom it

If you don’t understand where a number in a report came from, point to it with the mouse. When you point to numbers, Quicken changes the mouse pointer to a magnifying glass marked with a + symbol. Double-click the mouse, and Quicken displays a list of all the transactions that make up that number.

This feature, known as QuickZoom, is extremely handy for understanding the figures that appear on your reports. If you printed a report that summarized spending by payee and then had a question about the payments made to Movies Galore, the cable company, you could double-click the Movies Galore number in the Spending by Payee report, for example. Quicken would display the report, like the one shown in Figure 7-5.

Ah, yes. Two cable TV bills. And you’re not even buying the premium channels package. Yikes.

See a problem? Fix it

You can sometimes fix erroneous report data right in a report window. If you select a report transaction and Quicken enables the Edit button (upper-left corner of the report window), you can click that button to display an Edit menu. The menu lists editing commands you can use to delete the selected transaction or to change the category, payee, or memo information.

Got a question about register transactions? Use a mini-report

If you’re looking at the Quicken register, and you select either the Payee or Category field, Quicken adds a mini-report button to the end of the field. (The actual mini-report button looks like a small piece of paper.) If you click the mini-report button, Quicken creates a small report that summarizes the transactions falling into the same category or transactions with the same payee, as shown in Figure 7-6.

If you click the Show Report button, which appears in the mini-report window, Quicken creates a transaction report for the same information shown in the mini-report.

Sharing report data with spreadsheets

If you use Microsoft Excel, you can export the report to the spreadsheet program. Just click the Export This Report to One of the Formats button and then select the Report to Excel Compatible Format option. Quicken displays a dialog box that you use to name and locate a tab-delimited text file. (Any spreadsheet program worth its salt can open a tab-delimited text file.) You may need to use this feature if you want to use a spreadsheet to analyze the report data.

You can also copy the stuff that appears in a report window to the clipboard. Just click the Export button and choose the Copy Report to Clipboard command. Then, to use the copied report, start your spreadsheet (or other) program and choose Edit⇒Paste to paste the stuff from the clipboard. This process really isn’t very hard, so go ahead and try it.

Sharing report data in PDF files

You can create a PDF version of the report. To do this, click the Export button and select the Export to PDF Format option. Quicken displays a dialog box that you use to name and locate the PDF file it will momentarily create. A PDF file of the report is just an electronic version of the report.

Editing and rearranging reports

You may notice that when Quicken displays the report window, it also displays rows of buttons, including Delete, Export, Back, Forward, History, Print, Save, Find/Replace, and Customize (refer to Figure 7-2 earlier in this chapter). Also appearing are the Date Range and the Subtotal By (or, context-depending, Column) drop-down list boxes. Earlier in the chapter, in “Printing the facts, and nothing but the facts,” I talk about what the Date Range drop-down list box does. So in the interest of fair play, in this section, I briefly discuss what the other buttons do. (Not all these buttons are available in every report document window, and sometimes Quicken uses different names to refer to them. I don’t know why, really. Maybe it’s just to keep you guessing.)

You really don’t need to worry about these other buttons. Read the discussion that follows only if you’re feeling comfortable, relaxed, and truly mellow. Okay?

Back, Forward, and History

The Back and Forward buttons let you move back and forth between open report windows. The History button displays a list of the windows you’ve displayed; you can choose a previously displayed window by clicking it in the list.

Delete

The Delete button deletes the current report from the report list. You can use this button to, in effect, undo any changes you’ve made to a report and return to the default report specifications.

Export

I talk about this option in the “Sharing report data with spreadsheets” and “Sharing report data in PDF files” sections, earlier in this chapter. Look there if you have questions.

Sort

The Sort button displays a list of sorting options that you can use for arranging information in the report. Enough said.

Save

Say you get into this customization thing. If you do, you should know that you can save your customized reports by clicking the Save button. When you click Save, Quicken displays the Save Report dialog box, shown in Figure 7-7. Mostly, Quicken displays this dialog box so that you can give your creation a name. You also use this dialog box to indicate the financial activity center in which Quicken should save your report.

By the way, after you create a saved report, you can reproduce it by selecting the report from the My Saved Reports section of the Reports & Graphs Center.

Find/Replace

The Find/Replace button displays the Find and Replace dialog box (not shown), which you can use to locate or change transaction information, as I describe in Chapter 4.

Customize

The Customize button displays the Customize [Report] dialog box, where [Report] names the report you’re fiddling with. The dialog box, which I discuss in more detail later in the chapter, lets you change the appearance and information presented in a report.

Date Range

I briefly mention the Date Range box earlier in this chapter, but here, I provide a slightly more detailed description. The Date Range text box displays a drop-down list that you can use to specify what time period you want listed in your report: the current month, last year, the current quarter to date, and so on.

Column subtotaling

The Column drop-down list box displays a list that enables you to tell Quicken you want to subtotal amounts by some criterion, as shown in Figure 7-8. Just select the criterion. Note that sometimes, Column is replaced by Subtotal By.

Charts Only Look Tricky

I love charts. I know that sounds goofy. But data graphics open up wonderful opportunities for communicating, and Quicken charts are really easy to use.

In fact, many times, Quicken adds a small chart to a report window. Take a look at Figure 7-9, for example, to see what I mean. You can also display just a chart, however.

To produce just a Quicken chart, first produce the report you want and then click the Show Graph button that appears in the report window. That’s it. Easy as rolling off a log.

Note: Not all reports provide data that can be plotted in a graph. Accordingly, you won’t see a Show Graph button in every report window.

Figure 7-9 shows a picture of a pie chart of spending data, but you’ll have much more fun looking at your own data in a picture. By the way, you can drill down through a chart to see a report that describes the data being plotted (see “Got a question about a number? Just zoom it” earlier in this chapter).

You can memorize customized graphs the same way you memorize customized reports. Just click the Save button at the top of the graph window. Then, when Quicken prompts you, give the graph a name. To reuse the graph later, select the graph from the My Saved Reports section of the Reports & Graphs Center.

Customizing Your Reports

If you want to extract some financial info tidbit, you can usually get what you want from one of the reports listed on the Reports menu, especially if you use the EasyAnswer feature to find the right report!

I should tell you something else, though: Quicken is remarkably sophisticated in its reporting. You can customize any report you see on the Reports menu.

To customize these reports, click the Customize button (available when a report window is displayed) to get to the nuts and bolts of your selected report.

I’m not going to describe the customization process in massive detail. I feel kind of bad about this omission, because there are probably a few people out there who, late one night, will decide that they want to know how to filter, sort, and customize. Of course, there are also people who will decide late some night that they want to know how to replace the transmission on a 1971 Triumph Spitfire, and I’m not describing that here, either.

But I do want to share a handful of (I hope) helpful hints.

Let me start by pointing out that the Display tab of the Customize Cash Flow dialog box (see Figure 7-10 for one example of this dialog box) provides text boxes you can use to name your report, pick what row and column headings get used, and specify how much detail appears on the report. You can, for example, indicate that you do or you don’t want to see cents, or that you want Quicken to calculate and show percentages.

The Accounts tab of the Customize dialog box (not shown) displays a list of the Quicken accounts you’ve set up, along with boxes and buttons you can use to specify which accounts’ transactions and details you want to include in your report. You can use these options, for example, to tell Quicken that you want to see only transactions from your business checking account.

The Categories tab (see Figure 7-11), the Payees tab and the Tags tab display lists of your categories payees and tags so you can, for example, exclude a particular category or include only a selected set of payees or tags.

Finally, the Advanced tab provides a bunch of other buttons and boxes you can use to fine-tune how a report looks. You can use Advanced-tab options to look at only cleared transactions, uncleared transactions, or tax-related transactions, for example.

Quicken doesn’t provide the same customization options for every report. But in all cases, you can make lots of changes to your reports — which means you probably can customize your way to the perfect report for your situation.