Net paycheck in budget

Chris Anderson

Is there a way to only budget your net paycheck for the income portion of a budget in QM?  QW had a "Paycheck" function that allowed you to do this.

Quicken_Tyka

Hello Chris,

To better answer your question, do you have the paycheck set up with the gross amount and then split off different amounts?

There isn't a specific button that does this, but if you have the amount of the paycheck entered into Quicken and have the category for the paycheck in the budget only that amount of income will show in the budget.

-Quicken Tyka

Chris Anderson

I enter the gross amount as the “Salary” category then all the various deductions are taken resulting in the net income. There is no category for the net income.

Quicken_Tyka

Hello Chris,

Thank you for answering that.

I will be changing the post to an Idea as there currently isn't an option to do this in the Mac version at this time.

Thank you for taking the time to come to the Community to make this contribution!

-Quicken Tyka

Tronzi

Is there a way to do this on the PC version?

I use paycheck wizard too. Looking at the categories, Salary is gross - there is no net salary (after all additions/deductions). A ‘shadow’ net salary would be very helpful for usage in the Budget tool. Otherwise, it requires budgeting out all the individual extra ideas that paycheck wizard tracks. Duplication of work.

Help to see this in the future.

Chris Anderson

If you go into Manage Categories within your Budget you can see an option to select Paychecks you've set up. This should only display the net income of your paycheck in the budget.

pheller

+1 on this feature request.

I tried this another way, which ultimate doesn't work either - I created an account for my employer and entered a paycheck as a split. The last split is categorized "Paycheck : Net Pay" and is a transfer to my checking account. Sadly, we cannot budget transfers.

I'd actually prefer this approach because I routinely have some $0 pay stubs for things like RSU releases. I need to put those transactions somewhere so I can do the appropriate splits for taxes and to transfer into the brokerage account.
I'd rather these entries not be in the checking account because they do not appear on the account statement to reconcile.

One alternative would be a mechanism to apply a category to the split remainder.

pheller

Now with budgeted transfers, the above works. I create a cash account for my employer and each paystub gets created there as a split with Gross Earnings, all deductions, transfers to 401k, health savings account, and then finally a transfer to my checking account.

I then adjust the budget to include transfers FROM this employer account. I do need to exclude the HSA and 401k from the budget, otherwise the budget does not have the desired effect of tracking net pay.

I still wish it would respect the category applied to the transfer (E.g., Paycheck : Net) and allow me to budget on that instead, rather than the transfer.

Lastly, a scheduled transaction to this employer account always shows up as a Bill, not an Income.

Austin@

I would love to see this feature implemented. Quicken Mac recently gained the ability to budget for detailed loan payments (where you have a transaction that splits out the principal, interest, escrows, etc.). With the new ability for loan payments, you can budget for the net amount of the loan payment transaction, while still breaking out all the splits in the register. I would love to see the same ability set up for transactions with the “paycheck” category as one of the splits, so that the budget would look at the net amount of these transactions. 

QuickAnt

Hello, when will this feature be available?

TTSguy

I've been complaining about this since 2004. It won't happen. Been told it can't be done!

Quicken Jasmine

Hello All,

The Community Support team regularly reviews long-standing posts and Ideas for relevancy and current interest. This Idea seems to have stalled and we would like to gauge the current interest in this request. 

If you would like to see this idea implemented, please add your vote and a comment explaining how this idea would be beneficial for you. More information, including steps to vote and how to submit your own Ideas for future product features/improvements, is also available here.

Thank you,

Quicken Community Support Team

Chris Anderson

Any updates on if or when this feature will be available?

Jon

@Chris Anderson Did you read the post immediately above yours? It's basically saying they're not going to consider doing this unless it gets a lot more votes real soon.

Austin@

I am still very interested in this feature. It is so hard to properly set up a budget that accurately reflects my paychecks since it means I would need to include my tax categories and other deductions in the budget, which change every month and are a pain to manually update. I have a workaround set up right now where I use a dummy cash account to add my gross paychecks with all of the line items and deductions broken down, then transfer the net amount to my checking account (so the gross paycheck transaction zeroes out). I then include transfers from my dummy gross paycheck account in my budget as income, which essentially lets me budget around just my net income, but it would be really nice if this were officially supported and implemented so I wouldn't need to use a workaround.

Chris Anderson

I’m sad to see this will not be implemented in Quicken for Mac. I found this feature very useful in Quicken for Windows.