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Actual vs. Budgeted Reports: customize date range and get comparisons (Q Mac) (7 Legacy Votes)

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Quicken Mac Actual / Budgeted Reporting – Variable YTD Report Option
REQUEST:
Provide a means to specify any specific previous month to use as the basis for a YTD Actual / Budgeted Report. This should also accommodate the ability to generate this report for December of the prior year.
BACKGROUND & IMPACT:
As of QMac V5.12.1, Year-to-Date Budget Reporting is only available for the current calendar month. Unless I am missing something, a YTD report for January through August (for example) must be generated by 11:59.19 PM on August 30. After 12:00AM September 1, the Budgeted amount for all categories will contain the whole of September’s budgeted amount, with the Actuals catching up throughout the month of September.
So, as a result, to capture August (and YTD) summary and detailed reporting for research, exporting, and reporting I must generate my August YTD reports on the very last calendar day of August (business day or non-business day) causing:
• The need for me to capture YTD data for reporting BEFORE the month actually ends
• loss of my bank’s nightly processing for the transactions for the last day of the month since bank daily closing typically runs overnight
The budget reports should be easier to read and work with. Only meaningful report is on the last day of the month.
@klnaylor and others who have asked above about a budget versus actual report, perhaps I'm not grasping what you want, as this seems to exist already. (Click Print on the budget screen, select Summary, and the report shows actual YTD vs. budget YTD.) What different data would you want to be able to specify for a report?
(I'm not suggesting additional reporting flexibility isn't needed; I'm just asking users to further explain to the developers what thier expectations or needs are.)
I found this thread today, Oct 2019...I see the discussion started in April 2018. Very simple and basic ask...Actual vs Budget. I can't believe it is not in. So many features in my deluxe version I don't use. Is there something I don't get ? I just want a report that will compare current year actual to my budget per category. Please help.
Thanks in advance.
You wrote: "I'm not sure why this is so difficult...." Just because it doesn't exist in Quicken Mac doesn't mean it's difficult. It may be or it may not be difficult. You also wrote" "especially since it has been a feature in Quicken for Windows for years." This doesn't make it any easier or faster to code for Quicken Mac.
The real issue is that there are dozens and dozens of enhancement requests the developers have received, and many, many features that exist in Quicken Windows that have not yet been implemented in Quicken Mac. They're continually working on adding new/improved functionality, but development progress is often slow because Quicken is a complex mass of code and the development team is rather small. Progress is definitely being made, but the backlog of requests from users will take months and, for some things, years to implement.
These Idea posts on this forum are one of a number of factors the developers take into account in developing their roadmap for future product development. This idea has, as of my writing this, only 6 votes. The more votes it attracts over time, the more likely it will be for it to be on the developers' radar. Then, it may depend on whether it's and easy thing to implement or something more complicated, or what other issues there are involving the same part of the program. For instance, we know that one of the top-ranked user requests it to allow budgeting for selected fund transfers (e.g. loan payments, savings). If they have to re-write a large chunk of code in the budget section of the program to make that change -- which the product manager has said they are going to do -- they may put other changes to budget functionality on hold until they open up this area of the program for changes. Developers are, understandably, reluctant to invest time to make changes in an area of the program which they may need to throw out and re-write in the near future to implement other changes.
Again, I think this change would be helpful and hope they implement it; I only wanted to try to provide some context and explanation about why something like this that seems pretty simply may end up taking a long time to get implemented.
As for it being a "relatively simple fix", I explained in this post above why things that seem like simple changes sometimes aren't, or sometimes are but are blocked by other planned work.
Not that it's a total indication of who would appreciate this feature, but I'd note that this Idea topic has 10 votes as I'm writing this, while some of the ones I mentioned above have 200 and 300+ votes. The more people who vote for this, the better the chances for it to be on the developers' radar and move up the priority list. I think they'll get to all of these, and many other fine ideas, over time; it's just a question of which ones come sooner and which come later.