Can I budget for Savings (show savings as a budget item) in the Quicken for Mac Budget

HQ

I'd like to track my Savings account objectives in the Quicken for Mac Budget.  Is that possible?

jacobs

The product manager for Quicken Mac has acknowledged that the developers are aware users want this capability, but we don't know when they may add functionality to enable this.

John_in_NC

No, it isn't possible.

You can't budget for savings, nor are there "savings goals" in the Mac version.

jacobs

The product manager for Quicken Mac has acknowledged that the developers are aware users want this capability, but we don't know when they may add functionality to enable this.

HQ

Thank you for your feedback.

Is this lack of capability related to Jim's question and the product manager's response below?

If so, I recall as much as a year ago this being described as a capability "top priority".  Now, it's disturbing to hear this functionality is "many months" away.  It doesn't sound like a priority any more. 

I'm not a software engineer so please excuse the simplicity of my question. Does "infrastructure work" mean a fundamental redesign of the product?  Was this capability never envisioned as important such that it is requiring major platform changes?

Like Jim, I have been waiting release after release for what seems like a fundamental capability for personal finance software.. vs changing fonts. 


Quicken
Marcus 

March 8

Jim said:

Every time the New Version of Quicken pop-up appears on my desktop, I get extremely excited...eagerly hopeful that my Mac version of Quicken has finally been updated to track selective account transfers within the budget. Reality eventually sets in. Nope...still a Windows version only feature. Sadness.

This is a top priority for us as well but unfortunately, it's a big big change and will take many months to do.  The plan is that once we get through some of the infrastructure work we're doing now, we'll turn our full attention back to budgets and will redo a bunch of stuff.  In the short term, we'll probably try to allow filtering of accounts which will allow one to include one side of the transfer so that the transfers don't cancel each other out.  For example, one can include their checking account and exclude the loan account so that the mortgage payment appears in the budget.ponse?

jacobs

Infrastructure work could be anything. They spent nearly a year rewriting parts of the program to move off some of the Intuit servers after being sold off, and most of that work was invisible to end users, but necessary to move forward. Other times there have been large behind-the-scenes projects for networking security changes, again invisible to us end users. Or they may have to re-architect parts of the database in order to enable some of the features users are asking for.

Was this capability never envisioned as important such that it is requiring major platform changes?

It may seem that the developers were very short-sighted in the original design of the program, but the program is actually pieces of multiple eras of development work. Back in 2006, once Intuit decided that Quicken 2007 was the end of the line and they needed to start over for the modern Mac OS, they dared to re-imagine what personal finance software should be. The planned Quicken Financial Life product died in beta testing. But parts of that work were re-used in the second effort, which came to market as Quicken Essentials in 2010. Because they were a long way from finished, the then-new management team decided to push out Essentials as a stop-gap without investment tracking and many other features. Many users stuck with Quicken 2007, Intuit management changed (again), Mac development was halted and restarted. What then came to market as Quicken 2015 was built on the core code and user interface of Quicken Essentials, although some of the innards needed to be rewritten.

So if you've wondered why you can drag and drop transactions between banking accounts, but not between investment accounts, it's because the banking accounts were from the original Essentials development, while the investment accounts were grafted on for Quicken 2015 and architected differently.

What are the infrastructure changes they've bene hunkered down in the bunker working on over recent months? We don't yet know. The good thing is that while infrastructure work consumes a lot of time and doesn't result in the features we all want, what usually follows is an outpouring of new functionality that was enabled by the behind-the-scenes work. That's what Marcus seems to be saying is coming in the months ahead.

bayoyong

I just created a category for each type of savings I have. I have separate accounts for each savings type. So the transfers show up as an "expense" each month.