Actual vs. Budgeted Reports: customize date range and get comparisons (Q Mac) (13 Legacy Votes)

juliandavis

Absolutely agree with all of the above - actual vs budgeted income and expense for a date range is fundamental. I'm already looking for an alternative to Q for Mac that will allow two people with joint and personal accounts to record their financial data.

jacobs

@juliandavis You may already be aware of this, but Quicken has a number of features which can be used to separate and combine finances for two people. Of course, you can have separate accounts -- for checking, savings, cash, credit cards, etc. -- where that is useful. You can also use Tags for two different people, so that income and expenses can be kept in joint accounts but reported on separately. And you can make different categories for direct people if there are places where tags doesn't fill the need. (Budgets, for instance, don't support tags, because multiple tags on a transaction could cause the same money to be counted more than once in a budget.)

If you're fully up-to-speed on what Quicken Mac can and can't do, and it doesn't meet your needs, then I understand moving on if you've found something which better meets your needs. But if you're new to Quicken Mac and just need some help from longtime users on how to mesh your needs and Quicken's capabilities, by all means create a separate post about the issues you're trying to solve.

Regarding the budget issue, as has been written above in this thread, until the developers add user-controls for dates -- which we all hope they will do sooner rather than later! -- you can pretty easily export your budget and actual data for the months you want and work with that data in a spreadsheet. 

Paul Kleeberg

is Actual vs budget for a date range ever going to be resolved? 2007 had it and it was valuable.  Currently I must export to excel and manipulate it.  Silly.

jacobs

Paul Kleeberg said:

is Actual vs budget for a date range ever going to be resolved? 2007 had it and it was valuable.  Currently I must export to excel and manipulate it.  Silly.

Yes, I'm certain it will be resolved.

We just don't know when!  

And yes, it is silly that this has not been addressed for so long. We can only hope it's high on the developer's roadmap.

C Marshall

PLEASE ! I Quicken for Mac a budget vs actual report where I choose the date range.

JTD7

When will this feature be added. I have to agree with another user's assessment:

"...I find it one of the most confounding omissions in Quicken Mac at the moment. It seems as if the developers don't actually use the budget feature; they checked off that they had created a budget report, but didn't understand it's only accurate 12 days a year...."

The lack of this feature is why I am currently still using 2007 to track my spending while using the current version to track investments. I'd be a lot happier with Quicken if they get this done.

sdackin

Ditto…very frustrating. Would like to see the software morph into a “financial planning” tool.

jhptx

Budget versus actual comparisons is a fundamental money management tool and was available in the 2007 version of Quicken for Mac. This seems like an easy thing to provide in the new Quicken for Mac. Isn't someone from Quicken readying these posts? Yes, you can take an excerpt for the month from the 12-month comparison by month of each month in the calendar year but not for a year to date or other user-specified date range (which you could do with the 2007 version).

jacobs

@jhptx "Isn't someone from Quicken reading these posts?" Yes and no. Individually, no, they aren't. Perhaps when they go to implement a particular feature, they will read through all the posts in a thread to make sure they understand the expectations across the user community before they begin building a feature. But day-to-day? No, no executives are reading all the posts here.

That said, in the case of this feature request, because of the strong number of votes for it, this thread has a a status of "Under Consideration", which means it has been presented to the product and development teams for Quicken Mac. It is beyond frustrating that it can remain "Under Consideration" for more than a year — but that doesn't mean they haven't considered it, or even that they haven't decided if this is worthwhile. In their peculiar way of doing things, Quicken doesn't change the status from "Under Consideration" to "Planned" until a development project has been given a specific slot (both time on the calendar and assigned to one or more engineers) on their development schedule. So an idea which everyone might agree is worthwhile and is definitely going to be implemented may longer in "Under Consideration" status until the right pieces align on the development team to tackle the work.

That's just some background about how planning for features happens, if you find it helpful. In the meantime, I think everyone who uses the Quicken Mac budget (or wants to) agrees it is crazy that users can't specify a time range for an actual-versus-budget report, and that this issue has gone unaddressed for so long. We can only hope that 2022 is the year when this will finally get acted on.

(Meanwhile, if you have never voted for this feature, please do so by going to the first page of this thread and clicking the little black arrow in the yellow box; if the arrow is light gray, you've already voted for this Idea. More votes can and does influence priority order as the developers pick among hundreds of feature requests to work on.)

Jim Herbste

I agree. Need a comparison report showing 3( ytd actual, ytd budget and difference).

reastland

I can't effing believe that this report is not here. I spent a lot of time developing my budget and there is not a simple "out of the box" report to show actual expenditures compared to budgeted expenditures? Really? For real?

Get on this, Intuit! How unsophisticated are you?

pleake47

There are many ways to use the reports section in Quicken for Mac, however I would like to be able to bring budget numbers into some of the reports for comparison. Is there any plan for this to happen? Apparently, with talking to support you cannot do this!

Paula

stryger1

I'm new here so if I've missed something give me a pass please. I found this thread because I wanted to see a month by month report of my actual expenses vs what I had budgeted. I DID find what I was looking for and I think it pertains to this conversation.

On the Planning > Budget page I clicked on "Reports" near the top right of the page. In the drop down list I selected "Current Budget". The pop up report shows my actual vs budget for each month organized by categories. There is a selector on the top left of that report page for choosing a date range. I hope this helps someone!

7domino

Stryger1. This thread is for Quicken for Mac and I don’t see a planning tab on mine. Is it new?

stryger1

7domino, I missed that the thread was specifically for Quicken for Mac. I am using Quicken for Windows. Even so, I would hope the functionality would be available in either version. As others have pointed out this is a basic function.

Perhaps it is located in another area? The planning tab displays your budget for the month.

mrvd

Interesting. At least we now know this issue is specific to the Mac version of Quicken. You'd think Quicken "Customer Support" could have brought this to our attention years ago. I assumed they monitored these sites. Apparently not. Thanks Stryger1

sdackin

Does quicken customer support monitor these discussions? I’ve not seen a reply addressing this issue?

jacobs

sdackin said:

Does quicken customer support monitor these discussions? I’ve not seen a reply addressing this issue?

No, Quicken Customer Support does not monitor this forum. But that’s not who we need here — it’s the product development team which is responsible for planning and implementing new features. Please read my post above from earlier this year about this process:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20232897/#Comment_20232897

mrvd

Thank you Jacobs. A decision making process worthy of our Congress.

rpbwww

Currently Budget can only be by 1 month or 12 months. To be useful we need to be able to evaluate on a quarterly or half yearly basis. Exporting to a spreadsheet is n a poor work around and requires additional work to get totals. I have been asking for this for several years, I cannot believe I am the only one. Anyone from Quicken please provide a date. Thank you. Roberto

NotACPA

We're other  users and can't answer your question.

I've contacted the Mods so  that this can be turned into an  IDEA that other users can vote on to see if it gathers support.

rpbwww

Thank you for the forward. I am used to forums being monitored by company representatives. Is that not the case here? Anyhow I hope enough people will vote on it. How does one contact the Mods? Thanks again.

jacobs

@rpbwww There is already a long-running Idea post for actual-versus-budget reports for user-selected dates, which you can see and vote for here. @NotACPA This is one of the most frequently-asked for features in Quicken Mac! (In Quicken Mac, you can view year-to-date versus actual, but you cannot percent it; worse, the YTD is always based on the current date, so if you wanted to compare actual to budget through the end of the past month, you can't. It's a huge lacking feature in Quicken Mac.)  [A site moderator has merged the 3 posts above into this existing Idea thread.] 

@rpbwww Why are we still waiting for such a basic feature? One reason is the developers have hundreds of feature requests, and their progress implementing them is steady but slow. There are several popular feature requests for the budget area of the program, including configurable budget reports, monthly "roll overs", an "everything else" line for categories not specifically budgeted. Now here's my speculation: implementing some of these budget changes may require significantly re-writing the entire code for budgets in Quicken Mac, and they don't want to invest time making piecemeal changes to parts of the budget code which will be discarded when they have to re-write it. So we get no improvement to the budget until they invest significant time in rebuilding the budget infrastructure in the code. If I'm right, we can only hope that a programmer has been working on re-writing the budget code for months, and that they're closer to the finish than the start. 

rpbwww said:

Anyone from Quicken please provide a date.

Quicken never says when a feature will arrive. The program is complex, and adding features can turn out to be more time-consuming than they originally estimate; rather than having users yelling "you said the XYZ feature would be out in the second quarter" wen they miss an estimate, they choose to simply never share what features they're working on, what's on the roadmap for future work, or when any particular feature is expected. 

rpbwww said:

I am used to forums being monitored by company representatives. Is that not the case here?

Yes, there are a small number of Quicken moderators who mange this forum. They keep things civil, deal with misplaced or duplicate threads, and provide help/suggestions to some user problems. But they're not privy to many of the inner workings of the product development teams, so they often know nothing about what's coming or how long a bug fix will take. All the Quicken staff who post in this forum are easy to identify because their names begin with Quicken (e.g. "Quicken Bob" or "Quicken_Mary"). 

Quicken Anja

Hello @rpbwww,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community with your request.

I went ahead and merged your Idea to this active Idea thread regarding this topic.

Ideas are reviewed by our Development and Product teams to see what features people would like to have available in the future. Please, be sure to add your own vote (on page 1) as well by clicking the up arrow (see example below).

Thank you!

rpbwww

Quicken Anja, thank you. I have added my vote. We are at 139, is that considered a high or a low number when it comes to new features? I have been using Quicken on a Mac since it came out and I am disappointed that the current version doesn't have a better budgeting tool like it used to have. Anything you can do to accelerate it is appreciated. Thanks.

sdackin

Not sure how to add my vote as I support the addition of this feature

jacobs

sdackin said:

Not sure how to add my vote as I support the addition of this feature

Click on the "1" just above or this link to jump to the first page of the thread. There you will see a yellow box with the vote counter; click the arrow under the counter to see your vote registered. 

rpbwww said:

We are at 139, is that considered a high or a low number when it comes to new features?

It's a high number... probably one of the Top 5 at this point.

From my post above, here's why I think we are still waiting to see this functionality added to Quicken Mac:

One reason is the developers have hundreds of feature requests, and their progress implementing them is steady but slow. There are several popular feature requests for the budget area of the program, including configurable budget reports, monthly "roll overs", an "everything else" line for categories not specifically budgeted.

Now here's my speculation: implementing some of these budget changes may require significantly re-writing the entire code for budgets in Quicken Mac, and they don't want to invest time making piecemeal changes to parts of the budget code which will be discarded when they have to re-write it. So we get no improvement to the budget until they invest significant time in rebuilding the budget infrastructure in the code. If I'm right, we can only hope that a programmer has been working on re-writing the budget code for months, and that they're closer to the finish than the start. 

jacobs

Here's some good news for anyone who has posted in this thread over several years, seeking a way to generate actual-versus-budget reports for a user-specified ending date or date range: the status has recently been changed from "Submitted for Consideration" to "Planned". So the good — very good — news is that the developers understand this request, have agreed that this is a desirable feature, and have it on their development roadmap for implementation. The bad news: we never know when various features are planned for release; it could be next month or it could be 18 months. Progress in Quicken Nation comes in small steps forward.

Rob C NYC

🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

Holen1bvw

It is unbelievable to me that as a 40 plus year user of Quicken I can not get the same reports in Mac that I did in Windows. All I want to do is compare my expenses to the budget I created so I can track those expenses versus budget on a month to month basis. Why do I need a budget if I cannot compare it to expenses. Please expedite this reporting or I will be leaving QUICKEN after all these years. Thank you.