Exporting the "Edit Budget" view to a spreadsheet like Apple Numbers?

HQ

Is there a way to export or copy the "Edit Budget" view to a spreadsheet like Apple Numbers?

John_in_NC

No, you can't export from the Edit mode view. (Well, you can take a screenshot, but I don't know how helpful that would be.)

You can exit from the edit mode, and you then will have the option (at the upper right) to export the full budget to CSV. This might work for you as it will have all your budget goals in it.

John_in_NC

No, you can't export from the Edit mode view. (Well, you can take a screenshot, but I don't know how helpful that would be.)

You can exit from the edit mode, and you then will have the option (at the upper right) to export the full budget to CSV. This might work for you as it will have all your budget goals in it.

HQ

John, thanks for your response. Confirmed my experience.

Is it possible for someone from the Quicken development team to explain "why" it's not technically possible to export the Edit Budget content to a spreadsheet? Something other than it's not a feature.

jacobs

@HQ There are about a thousand questions we'd love to hear from the developers about, but members of the development team just don't come on this site and explain their design decision or prioritization of features. the most we get, from time to time, is a little interaction with the Quicken Mac product manager, Marcus, around the time of each new release.

And the answer to your question, I'm sure, is exactly what you asked for it not to be: it's just something they haven't built yet. I'm not a Quicken employee, just a fellow user like you, albeit one who has followed Quicken Mac development very closely, and can perhaps offer some insights.

Pretty much anything is technically possible. Whether, or when, it gets developed is the complicated question. First, they need to perceive that there's a legitimate need for certain functionality. Then they need to assess how long it would take to develop it, including any underlying changes that might affect other areas of the program and compatibility with the online (mobile and web) products which need to be interoperable between Mac and Windows desktop users. Then they need to decide where a particular feature fits on the development timetable in terms of priority. Then they need to figure out which of the developers on the team has the skills/knowledge to work on specific areas of the code (e.g. there are database programmers, operating system tool programmers, interface designers, etc.), and what other projects they've already been tasked with. Wrap all those issues together, and the result determines what gets done in what order.

In the case of budget functionality, originally there was no real budget in the modern Quicken Mac when it debuted in 2014. (There was limited month-by-month budgeting that few users found useful.) In April 2016, they added 12-month budgeting, the top user-voted feature request at the time. Over ensuing months, they made enhancements and fixes to the budget functionality. It took about 4 releases with budget improvements before there was even a way to print the budget. Marcus wrote at that time (November 2016): "This is still a pretty basic print capability and doesn't give you a lot of flexibility but it's a start.  If you want lots of flexibility, I would still recommend copying the report and pasting it into Excel or Numbers and then manipulating it those apps before printing." The printed report was pretty dismal; it took until version 5.8 last fall for them to add functionality for budgets to be printed based on the number of months you want to see on a page.

But other requested budget enhancements haven't appeared. One reason was that they suspended work on the budget part of Quicken Mac for awhile because the Quicken Cloud (mobile and Web) team were forced to redesign how budgets worked after Quicken moved off former parent Intuit's servers in 2017. The Mac team didn't want to work on budget enhancements only to find they needed to re-write the code to work with the cloud-based programs (which in turn have to be compatible with Quicken Windows as well). The most-requested budget features the last few years have been the ability to include fund transfers -- like mortgage payments, car payments, savings funds -- in a budget, and a budget rollover feature to move surpluses/deficits to the following month. The developers have said that both of those features are officially planned for future release. But Marcus indicated that some of this functionality required some significant architectural changes in the budget area of the program, and that it would take many months to achieve.

None of that relates to your specific request, but hopefully it illustrates the complexity of Quicken Mac development, and some of the reasons things do and don't progress at times.

I actually don't recall seeing a request before to export the Edit budget view to a spreadsheet. That doesn't mean it's not a good idea, but it might explain why it hasn't been implemented or on the developers' roadmap. It might help if you create a new Idea Post under the "Product Ideas - Quicken for Mac" category to request this features and explain why it would be useful. When the developers open up certain areas of the program to work on, we're told that they often look at the Idea suggestions for related ideas to consider incorporating while they're working in that part of the program.

Hope that's of at least some help.

HQ

Jacobs... thanks for your background information. Some of this I'm aware of from past responses. Good idea about posting under Product Ideas.

To me, the Edit Budget view lays out the budget in a very consumable, easy to use and read presentation starting with the top (3) lines of month by month and TOTALS for Income, Expenses, and Difference. Looks like a spreadsheet.

Again, I'm not a software engineer/developer but I just don't get why it would be that difficult to provide the capability to export this info to a CSV file format so it could be placed in a Numbers or Excel spreadsheet.

Thanks again.
HQ

jacobs

@HQ, it may be that it isn't that difficult to provide this export at all. It's a question of (a) have users asked for it? and (b) where does it fit with all the other priorities they're working on. We're unlikely to get an answer to (b), but you can take care of (a)!