Mac: Not budgeting investment income 2018

Unknown

There are posts that are two years old and Quicken never responds other than to state that this problem in under consideration.

Guess this means the problem has been put in the Jr. Programmers stack of many many issues to take care of.  Hope it comes out while I still have investment income to consider

Unknown

Quicken Mac's budgets don't allow for transfers, which is the root of the problem.

Therefore, income from investments or retirement accounts that get transferred to a checking or other cash flow type account don't get included because the transfer "out" of the investment account cancels out the transfer "in" to the cash flow account.  

This also is a problem for mortgage and loan accounts where the principal amount transferred "from" a cash flow account cancels out the principal amount "into" the loan account.

So, you also can't budget for the total amount of a loan either.

You would think that this would have seemingly been a very high priority to fix...but apparently it's further down the Quicken list than we would like.  

This is basically the only thing stopping me from ditching Quicken Windows and going full time with Quicken Mac.  

Still hoping this gets fixed...one day.  

smayer97

Actually, it is even more complicated than that. As has been mentioned elsewhere, Quicken had to pull the Budget feature for Mobile, for syncing with Quicken Cloud. So it seems that all changes to budgets are intertwined with the Mobile feature also. I believe whatever caused them to pull the feature from Mobile is what is slowing down the progress of ANY features related to budgets. 

From what I can tell, it is not a low priority but it seems there are complexities they are working on that is part of the delay.

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willi1

I was wondering if anyone been able to come up with a workaround for this?  Thanks in advance...

megnmac

Investment income is included in reports, but not in the budget, making the budget useless. This has been reported since Quicken for Mac 2016 at least. I don't need more bells and whistles, so I see no point in upgrading if something as basic as this can't be fixed. It worked in 2007.

jacobs

megnmac said:

Investment income is included in reports, but not in the budget, making the budget useless. This has been reported since Quicken for Mac 2016 at least. I don't need more bells and whistles, so I see no point in upgrading if something as basic as this can't be fixed. It worked in 2007.

The Mac product manager has indicated they are working on new functionality for allowing transfer in budgets. It's not as simple as it may seem, since some transfers -- such as loan payments or savings goals) are desirable to include in budgeting while other transfers -- such as paying off a credit card bill for which the expenses already exist in the credit card account -- should not be part of the budget. So the trick is giving users control over mixing revenue/expense transactions with selected fund transfer transactions in a logical way. We don't know when to expect this new functionality to be released. (But typically he doesn't even mention it unless they're working on it, so if I was akin an educated guess, we'll see something in this are released in the first half of 2019.)

megnmac

megnmac said:

Investment income is included in reports, but not in the budget, making the budget useless. This has been reported since Quicken for Mac 2016 at least. I don't need more bells and whistles, so I see no point in upgrading if something as basic as this can't be fixed. It worked in 2007.

Budgets make no sense if all income is not included. Retired people use their investments as income, otherwise why invest. I can never have a balanced budget if that income is not included.

smayer97

megnmac said:

Investment income is included in reports, but not in the budget, making the budget useless. This has been reported since Quicken for Mac 2016 at least. I don't need more bells and whistles, so I see no point in upgrading if something as basic as this can't be fixed. It worked in 2007.

You can add your VOTE to Add investment income on budgets.

First, click on the underlined link above to go there, then click VOTE at the top of THAT page, so your vote will count for THIS feature and increase its visibility to the developers by seeking to have the features you need or desire end up in the latest version.

While you are at it, you may want to add your VOTE to related IDEAS found on the 
List of Requests Related to Investments and the List of Requests Related to Budgets. Click on the underlined link, then follow the instructions to add your vote to more related ideas. Your VOTES matter!

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

megnmac

megnmac said:

Investment income is included in reports, but not in the budget, making the budget useless. This has been reported since Quicken for Mac 2016 at least. I don't need more bells and whistles, so I see no point in upgrading if something as basic as this can't be fixed. It worked in 2007.

I kept getting multiple instructions on how to vote but it took about ten screens before I got to the one to vote on. I don't see how this gives an accurate picture of how many are affected by the lack if complete budget information, as I have seen multiple posts from unhappy users, many of whom won't consider updating at this point.

jacobs

megnmac said:

Investment income is included in reports, but not in the budget, making the budget useless. This has been reported since Quicken for Mac 2016 at least. I don't need more bells and whistles, so I see no point in upgrading if something as basic as this can't be fixed. It worked in 2007.

The first link just above your post "Add investment income on budgets" takes you to the page where you can click Vote at the upper right; the other links can get confusing, as they offer lots of other links to ideas for features in related areas.

As for the accuracy of these vote counts, I think Quicken understands that this is only a small  subset of the overall user community. I'm not sure that the absolute number of votes matters at all -- it's the relative number of votes that different ideas put forward that helps inform their thinking.

In any case, as I noted just above, the Mac product manager has indicated they are working on new functionality for allowing transfers in budgets, so I'm not sure that there's much do do except sit and wait -- along hope the developers grasp the ways different users want/need this functionality to work.

smayer97

megnmac said:

Investment income is included in reports, but not in the budget, making the budget useless. This has been reported since Quicken for Mac 2016 at least. I don't need more bells and whistles, so I see no point in upgrading if something as basic as this can't be fixed. It worked in 2007.

Yes start by adding your vote on the first link... ;-)

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