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FAQ: Budget View and Budget Report Updates

Quicken KathrynQuicken Kathryn Administrator admin
This is a work in process, but soon we'll be fixing a bug in budget view calculation:


In the budget view, the balance is the same whether Budget is +100 or -100, and is also different from the budget report.





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Quicken stores Income budget items as positive numbers and Expense budget items as negative numbers, similarly to how a transaction amount that increases the balance of a bank account (typically income) is stored as a positive number and a transaction amount that decreases the balance of a bank account (typically expense) as a negative number.


The problem occurs if any of the Budget or Actual items is negative.  At this point, the Budget View – different from the Budget Report – takes the Absolute Value of the Budget and the Actual before computing the Balance.


So where you might expect that if you had negative expense (say because you returned something you bought) Quicken would calculate as follows:


Expense Items


Budget: 100


Actual: -40


Balance:140                      // Your budget was $100 of expense, but not only did you not spend anything you got $40 back!


 


But, because it takes the absolute value it shows this:


Expense Items


Budget: 100


Actual: 40


Balance:60                        // Does not agree with budget report.


 


Although we think it’s best for the budget view to beconsistent with the budget report, we don’t want to disrupt members who are usedto the old way, so when we push this fix out in February, we’ll alsoprovide instructions on how to maintain the current budget view calculations.
Quicken Kathryn
Community Administrator
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