My Goal: I want to look back and see what we actually spent in each of my categories between 01/2025 and 12/2025 - the amount per month and the total for the year. And I would like to be able to enter a budgeted amount for each category and have the program compute the actual spending. My Quicken data file for last year is already complete - all accounts Reconciled, all transactions Categorized.

I am not clear on the following -

(does Quicken provide basic how-to instructions, and if not, why not?)

• Should I start by setting the "Budget as of…." function to 1/2025 to set the 12-Month period displayed?

• Having done that, is Quicken supposed to populate the Budget fields (months) with the actual spending for that time period?

• Quicken seems to go ahead and automatically set the Budgeted Amount per Category to the amount actually spent - if that's normal, I guess I have to then use the "Edit Budget" feature to adjust the budgeted amount to my target number.

• When the time comes to move on to a new year, am I supposed to (a)duplicate the budget, and then (b) set a new start date? — how?

As an alternative (and considering the problems users seem to be having with the Budget feature in Quicken) can you describe or point to instructions for exporting the above data into a spreadsheet so I can manually create the information display I want?

Thanks for looking. Any help will be greatly appreciated!

However, in the catefory monthly report, all I see is the loan interest expense. The money I spend to refuce the principal does not show up as an expense, at least not one that is defined as a category. It shows up as a transfer to the mortgage account and therefore, is not included as a monthly expense.

HOw do I track all my expenditures and income if sokme of those entries are transfers between accounts?

When comparing with the Quicken for Windows, the Tax Schedule Report from Quicken for Windows does show the "correct net" taxable amount, which is the gross icome minus the pre-tax deductions.

Is tha the expected behavior of the Quicken for Mac?

In addition to the survey, we’re also offering the opportunity to schedule a call with our team to discuss your experience using Quicken for budgeting. We’d love to hear directly from you about what’s working well, what could be better, and any suggestions you have for future improvements.

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Is it possible to print/export a budget model as presented in the budget edit mode? I prefer to see this "annual P&L type" layout to the options presented in standard report offering.

Mac Quicken Classic Premier 8.4.1

Greatly appreciated,

Note that Capital Gains are not listed. Here's the relevant portion of the Category List:

This shows many more categories (including those for Capital Gains) than the Budget recognizes. IMHO, seems like an easy bug to fix. This must be really old, non-maintained code.

My question for someone who uses the Mac version… Is there a way to review one's federal taxes due throughout the year using the Mac version? If so, how would one do this? Thank you.

Part of me tinkering with the calendar is I would really like a calendar that shows my exepcted inflows of wages and bills I have already setup on "Bills & Income". I don't want all the transactions, etc…just in vs out…essentially instead of a table interface on "bills", show me on the calendar. I feel like I'm missing something obvious here?

Thanks in advance!!

When creating a Budget, I'm entering total annual $$ amount for 9 different categories (that were voted on and approved) and getting a pre-determined Grand Total. That number then divides by 12 months and everything is good up to this point. But when my expenses for a particular month are more or less than the assigned monthly $$ amount, it adjusts the total ANNUAL BUDGETED number automatically. Since expenses are rarely the same for every month, i.e, electric bill, it should even out by the end of the fiscal year and be close to the approved annual dollar amount. But since the TOTAL annual number keeps changing throughout the year, how do I know, by looking at the Budget, how my expenses are comparing to my TOTAL APPROVED ANNUAL BUDGET. I don't. And when I've asked Quicken about this several times, I'm told that's how Quicken's budget works. This is not a budget, it's a glorified expense report. AM I MISSING SOMETHING!! HELP!!! 😠

In setting up my accounts, I tried to find the best investment one that would fit my CalPERS (California Public Employees Retirement System) but none of them really fit. Round peg, square hole sort of thing. CalPERS does not permit me to allow electronic access as my credit union does so it has to be manual. But I don't know how to set it up in Quicken so I can update it monthly. I need it to show my balance but even though it earns good interest in its investments, it doesn't have that feature that a mutual fund does, for example. How can I handle this?

Thank you for your help. I feel overwhelmed and uncertain how to proceed. Detailed steps would be very helpful but I would appreciate any direction.

I'm trying to get the most out of Quicken Mac's limited tax reports so I'm revisiting how I have our paychecks laid out. We each received taxable life insurance benefits and my wife pays our pre-tax health insurance premium. My question is:

How can I record the imputed income of the life insurance benefits accurately without inflating our net income? And how can I accurately account for the health insurance premium, which lowers taxable income, in the built in reports?

Bonus question: How does the Form 1040 report work? No transactions show up when I run it. All of our tax related transactions are present on the Tax Schedule report.

For the first time since graduating in Spring 2020 I will start making PSLF student loan payments at the end of November. Up until this point I had just been tracking the balance of the consolidation loan. I would like some advice on how best to reflect the transaction in both my budget and the loan account. My current idea is:

• Set up an automatic bill from my checking account to my loan servicer with the category "Student Loan Payment". This will reflect the cash flow out of my checking account correctly. Because I am using PSLF I don't particularly care what the interest/principal amount is in each payment.
• Manually adjust the balance of the loan on the first of each month. Using the built-in payment calculator is incompatible with the way PSLF payments are calculated.

If there is a simpler or more accurate way to go about this I'd love to hear it. Otherwise I think this will be sufficient for tracking budget amounts / cash flow / and net worth.

How do I address this?

So was ready to map out a budget and discovered the budgeting feature doesn't support rolling budget surpluses into the next month. Looks like this feature request has been in the queue for the better part of a decade. So unlikely to ever happen. Sufficed to say, any budgeting app that doesn't have this feature is fundamentally broken in my book (basically it's just a report).

Are there apps focused on budgeting that integrate well with Quicken Classic Mac? I'd rather not have to manage two of every account and their transactions. So something that sync's up would be ideal.

I have a lot of budget categories, and scrolling down takes a while. First, I am not sure why scrolling is so slow. You could probably fix that easily.

Second, when I update a budget item, why does the entire screen have to refresh? This puts me back up at the top of the budget, and I must locate the category again. Could you please just refresh the individual budget item and leave me where I was on the screen.

Third, I would like for you to either 1) default the budget groups to collapsed or 2) retain the last setting I had the last time I was on the screen (possibly some collapsed and some open). This would allow me to quickly locate the budget group and categories I am looking for without having to scroll up and down the entire screen. Instead, I can focus on the budget group I care about at the moment.

Finally, if you could add a search field at the top that would filter the categories that would be awesome. For example, I would type 'Rental Prop' and my rental property categories would be the only one showing. For example: Rental Property Repairs, Rental Property Marketing, Rental Property Cleaning, etc.

Thank you!

I'm guessing it may not be possible, but the workaround that I've used for years was to use a separate transfer to mortgage in the split, but that would result in an equal but opposite uncategorized "negative expense." I just recently discovered that when I run the income & expense report from the dashboard, that uncategorized transaction shows up as income. Oops. I don't want that.

Quicken for Mac, latest release (Version 8.3.1).

😑