Quicken 2017 Mac: Adding Transfers to a Budget

Unknown

I am building an annual budget in Quicken 2017, Mac edition; however, categories associated with transfers always reflect a zero balance, since they are always a zero-sum transfer. Is there any way to budget the transfer? I use transfers for things like IRA, 529, 401(k) contributions, and then within those specific accounts I enter all of the buy transactions.

Any help you can provide would be great, thanks!

smayer97

Not at this time. You can now VOTE for the feature to Include or Exclude Transfers on Budgets, here: https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/add-ability-to-include-or-exclude-transfers-on-b...

First, click on the link above to go there, then click VOTE at the top of THAT page, so your will vote count for THIS feature and increase its visibility to the developers.

(If you find this reply helpful, please be sure to click "Like", so others will know, thanks.)

 

Unknown

I'm having the same issue. And it's messing up my budget. I added a savings item in my budget (in my case, $1400 per month to my two kid's 529 plans). When I transfer the $1400 to the 529 plans from my checking account, the "Actual" amount for that month in the Budget analysis shows as $0, because, as noted above, transfers out of my checking account and into my 529 plans is a zero sum transfer.

I tried to solve this issue by going into the 529 plans' Settings and selecting "Exclude from Reports" so that the deposit into the 529 plan no longer show up in the reports leaving only the withdrawal from the checking account to appear. It should have worked, but it didn't. The "Actual" amount in the Budget analysis page still shows $0, However, when I click to see the transactions amounting to $0, the transactions are $1400! So, it worked when you drill into the number, but it didn't work in the overall summary page. This seems more like a bug, because I specifically requested to exclude the 529 account from this report, yet it's still being included in the Budget analysis page, but not when drilling into the specifics of the number. All Quicken has to do is to have the Budget analysis page to properly exclude the accounts which were marked to be excluded.

Unknown

Count me in as another guy who's frustrated by this.

How can I budget for a mortgage when Quicken considers the principal a transfer?

UKR

Allan Greendale said:

Count me in as another guy who's frustrated by this.

How can I budget for a mortgage when Quicken considers the principal a transfer?

Allan,
I'm a Quicken for Windows 2017 user, so I'm not sure how this would apply to or work in Quicken Mac 2017 ... (this message thread is about Q Mac)

To account for the transfer of my total mortgage payment (principal + interest + additional principal + escrow) in my budget, I went into the "Add categories to budget" function and added these
Transfer out categories:
Transfer to [mortgage account]
Transfer to [escrow account]

Unknown

Allan Greendale said:

Count me in as another guy who's frustrated by this.

How can I budget for a mortgage when Quicken considers the principal a transfer?

For a mortgage, there is indeed another option for Mac. If you go into "Edit Loan and Payment Terms", on the "Bill Reminder" tab, you can choose between "Payment Total Only", "Detailed Reminder" and "No Reminder". Since I already had a scheduled transaction for the mortgage, I selected no reminder, though I suppose I could have selected total only, and deleted mine.

How this is working out is my mortgage loan account balance is being reduced in its register each month by the correct principal amount (currently in the neighborhood of $1,000 principal, $400 interest). BUT, there is no transfer coming out of checking for that amount, nor the interest amount. Instead, my separate scheduled transaction for the full $1,400, to the Bills -> Mortgage Payment category, is continuing to hit every month.

This means accounting-wise, I'm not keeping correct track of interest expense, but I don't really care about that. More important to me is budget-wise, it correctly tracks the $1,400 total mortgage bill.

Unknown

I agree.  This is a huge oversight.

jacobs

David B said:

I agree.  This is a huge oversight.

David, for what it's worth, it's been acknowledged by the Mac product manager. They have to do some pretty significant architectural changes to address this, but it is on the development roadmap. Just don't expect anything in the short-term future.

Unknown

David B said:

I agree.  This is a huge oversight.

It is so basic to budgeting, I can not believe they missed it or went down a road so far as to make it a major problem to correct. It makes the program useless

As a budget tool

Les100

David B said:

I agree.  This is a huge oversight.

Is there any hope?  Looks like they have now stoped access to financial institutions for those using quicken for mac 2007!  So no more direct connections to banks.

Without the budget for transfers the current quicken is useless

jacobs

David B said:

I agree.  This is a huge oversight.

Les, as noted above, the Quicken Mac product manager has said this is something they are working on, so yes, there is hope that we'll see something in this area in 2019. (No idea when.)

Your needs may vary, but the absence of transfer is budgeting is something I find a bad omission and a definite annoyance to work around with manual addition -- but it doesn't make the program "useless" for everything else it does for me. 

As for Quicken 2007, I don't think they're doing anything but letting is slowly die on the vine. Individual financial institutions, however, may be turning off access to Quicken 2007 over time; financial institutions are especially wary of granting access to software that is no longer support or receiving security fixes. 

Les100

David B said:

I agree.  This is a huge oversight.

Good point on financial institutions not supporting obsolete software- I can appreciate that concern.   But I have to disagree with you on the term "useless" - I'm manually operating QFM 2007 now because Quicken for Mac 2017, which I bought, cannot serve any of my needs at all (reports depend on accurate budgets)- thus it's "useless."

jacobs

David B said:

I agree.  This is a huge oversight.

Les, I wouldn’t quibble if you said “Quicken 2017 doesn’t meet some of my needs, and so I’m continuing to use Quicken 2007.” (In fact, that statement is exactly where *I* stand.) l


But I do disagree with the statement that Quicken 2017 is useless software. There are tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people using it and its successor, so it’s clearly not “useless.” Some don’t use budgeting at all, so this limitation doesn’t affect them. Others can use the existing budgeting features and manually add a few numbers that Quicken doesn’t include, or export to a spreadsheet to add what Quicken doesn’t include.


It is useful software to many; it is not yet good enough for some, including you. My only objection was to a blanket statement that it’s “useless” software because of a particular missing feature. I absolutely understand, and support, the need for transfers in budgets, and I remain hopeful that this is forthcoming sometime in the year ahead because it has been acknowledged and promised by the product manager.

Unknown

David B said:

I agree.  This is a huge oversight.

I'm on Les's side on this one.

Not having the capability to include/exclude transfers in reports and budgeting makes the Mac version useless.

He's correct in that.  It states so right on the Quicken Mac box:  "Create customized budgets".  Except you can't customize them to include or exclude transfers from one account to another.  So no...you can't create customized budgets. 

It's a fundamental feature that's present in ALL personal financial software...except for Quicken Mac.  Please name me ONE personal finance software product, including online versions, that don't have this.  

Your suggestion to "manually add a few numbers" is ridiculous.  That's what we're all paying Quicken to do.  If we wanted to manually add a few numbers, I wouldn't need Quicken.  That's a copout of the first order.  Might as well just take out the old calculator and write down the budget results back on ledger paper.  

To say, well Quicken Mac is useful, provided you look past the omissions of what should have been a standard feature FROM DAY ONE, only makes excuses for Quicken.

And the excuse that "well, they're working on it" has been flying around since Quicken Mac 2015.  Here we are FIVE versions later.  And by all the Mac superusers, this is the NUMBER ONE voted feature that Quicken Mac needs to have.  I think the Mac users have been patient...to a fault...without having this fundamental feature added.

Just look at the starting date of THIS post.  TWO YEARS AGO.  I mean, it's two years already and still no solution in sight. 

Quicken Mac is useful as a checkbook register.  That I'll agree on.  But if I wanted just a basic checkbook register with basic reports that I HAVE to adjust, I could just as well download a Mac Excel or Numbers template, for free.  But to say it functions well as personal finance software, it misses the mark by far.  

Yet, I keep getting sucked back in to Quicken...hoping just one day they actually will have that solution released for their Mac version.  

jacobs

David B said:

I agree.  This is a huge oversight.

Wow, you missed my point entirely. I'm not defending Quicken for this missing feature, and I'm not saying people should just accept it and move on. If you use Quicken to measure your spending against a budget you set up, then I get it that Quicken currently requires awkward work-arounds to get the job done; if this is the primary reason you use Quicken, then yes, I suppose it is useless to you.

What I was saying is that many people don't even use the budget feature, so for them, Quicken Mac is not useless. Some people may use the budget a bit, but it isn't central to tracking their finances, so for them, Quicken Mac is not useless. (For me, for instance, seeing all my finances in one place makes it far more than a mere checkbook register, even though it lacks some key functionality which would make it a much better and more complete solution for me.)

Over the four years since the new Quicken Mac came to market, there have been a number of major features which were once missing and have since been added. Annual budgeting didn't even exist in Quicken 2015, or Quicken 2016 until the 3.3 release at the end of April 2016. Quicken Mac didn't handle loans until Quicken 2017 v 4.5 was released in April 2017. Was Quicken useless before that date? No, there were ways to handle loans manually, but for some people (especially those with a lot of loans), it was a bit of a pain. Some might have called it useless -- but for many other users, it wasn't useless; perhaps they have no loans or choose not to track them in Quicken, or were okay with manually updating their monthly split between principal and interest.

The point is simply that we all use different features of Quicken, so a "must-have" feature for one person is a "who cares?" feature for someone else. Is Quicken where it needs to be yet to satisfy almost all users? No. But that doesn't mean it is completely useless, at least for many users. That's all I was trying to say: from a broad perspective, Quicken Mac is not currently useless, even though its lack of certain functionality makes it unsatisfactory for some users.

I promise I'll make this my last post on this issue, because we're really arguing the semantics of "useless," and further go-rounds about that are probably, well, useless.

Unknown

Quicken Deluxe 2019 didn't address this issue either.  Totally frustrating since I would like to track my payments for each account and be able to budge for these transfers whether it be a loan or savings account.