Weird Report issue

[Barney]

I've been using  MS Money since ver 2 and I'm currently using UK ver 14. Everything is working OK except one particular Report.

I'm trying to do a report on Dividends, if I select 'Transactions by Category' and select All Dates it only gives me Dividends up to 2013, there is nothing after.  If I change the Category to Interest I get all the Interest payments as expected.

Likewise if I do 'Income & Expense' report I get all the Dividends.

 

I've tried files repairs but it makes no difference,  anybody have any ideas why some Dividend data would be missing from the 'Transactions by Category' report ?

[Cal Learner]

With the US versions, in Advanced Reports, there is a report called "Tax-related transactions" and another called "Investment Transactions". Do you have similar reports that show the missing dividends?

I am wondering if you started entering the Dividends into the Investment Transactions in 2013, and before that entered the transactions into the Cash Transactions.

I used Shortcuts to have a Reports icon at the top.

[Barney]

Thanks for the pointers.

All the missing Dividends showup in   "Tax-related transactions" and "Investment Transactions",  so the same as  'Income & Expense' which shows everything.

I haven't checked every transaction but so far they are all Dividend rather than Cash.

On the one side it's not an issue as I have all my standard reports, BUT now it's bugging me that this one standard report don't work  :-)

[J Hoban]

If they are showing in the Investment Transactions report, you could experiment by customize that report by changing the "Activities" in the report. I'd try clearing all, then add Activities back in.  If clicking on only Dividends shows all transactions, then I'd start looking at another filter like Accounts.  Alternatively, you could look at customizing your Dividends report to see what filters it is using:  Date, Investments, Accounts, Activities.  

[Barney]

I reckon I've tried every combination of options in the report, but it makes no difference. So back to thinking there is corruption somewhere.

The Level 2 repair doesn't fix it;  when I run the repair it says 'Your file has been repaired successfully... Choose View Log for more details'

The first few times I run repair there was no log file, I just got a Notepad message saying the file can't be found and did I want to create a new one.  If I said Yes it didn't create one, and searching for it turned up nothing.

So I created an empty  results.log file and run repair again, and now when I click view log it shows an empty log file.

Is that normal behaviour,  that it will say successful repair even when no errors where found, hence the empty log file ?

I won't spend anymore time investigating, I can get all the info I need from other reports;  it's just triggering my OCD....
Other than that Money is probably the best bit of software I use.

[Cal Learner]

Here is what I am thinking:

• Look at an entry in your Investment Transactions that shows up in the report. If the register is in single-line mode, do Ctrl+T. It is a toggle. Note the TransferTo field (under the Quantity heading).

• Look at an entry in your Investment Transactions that does not show up in the report. Note the TransferTo field (under the Quantity heading).

If different, I suspect that is the difference. 

Level 1 repair resets all reports, and deletes all of your favorite reports. You could try that on a copy of your file, but I would not want to lose my favorites.

[Barney]

So it's fixed,  just to recap for my own benefit.

When I run 'Transactions by Category' and filtered by Dividends it only showed ~45 entries.

Whereas  'Investment Transactions' filtered by Dividends gave over 1500 entries.

Thanks to Cal's suggestion I checked those 45;  some of those entries went back 20 years and where recorded as a cash deposit with Category Dividends,  i.e there was no Transferto field. In the earlier days I didn't understand the correct way to use many of the features.

So I went back and opened old accounts and corrected it all. Then when I run   'Transactions by Category' is was completely empty, which in a way made more sense that the previous results, it should either be all or nothing.

Run a few more repairs which made no difference, then I renamed the Category from Dividends to Dividend and back and the report worked.

I'm not convinced the renaming was the cure as I tried just doing that on a test copy and it made no difference. So i can only surmise it was a combination of all the repairs and tinkering.

Thanks Cal for the help.