How do I budget for loan payments in Quicken for Mac?

sweeneyryan

After my old Toshiba laptop crashed, I bought a new MacBook and transferred the hard drive data over. Everything seems to have transferred over fine, with the exception of my budget. It appears that I cannot budget loan payments to my car loan.

Ordinarily, the split for my car payment transaction would look like this:

Debit Credit
TO Car Loan $$
Auto Loan Interest $

My Bank Account $$$


However, it appears that I am not able to add the transfer to the car loan account in Quicken reflecting the principal portion. There is an option to budget for a generic "car payment," but if I understand correctly, that is an expense account that has no effect on the principal balance of the loan in Quicken.

The default budget settings appear to be tracking Income and Expenses only, resulting in an accrual-basis Income Statement. Maybe I'm over-thinking this, but I have an accounting background, and it doesn't make sense to me to budget only with income and expenses in mind. Revenue/expense is NOT the same thing as cash in/cash out. I want a report that shows sources and uses of cash, and that includes transfers to my emergency fund (currently a Savings Goal in Quicken) as a use of cash.

Is this possible to do in Quicken for Mac, or is there a workaround that I'm not seeing?

jacobs

You are correct that at the current time, you cannot budget for account transfers in Quicken Mac. While this is technically accurate from an accounting standpoint (a transfer of funds from your checking account, an asset, to your loan account, a liability, is not an expense), what most people want is to be able to budget for the cash flow impact of the loan payment. This is one of the top user requests, garnering more than 460 votes, and the developers have said that they will implement a way to do this. (You can no longer add your vote to the thread, because it has been marked "Planned".) We just don't know when this feature will appear.

jacobs

You are correct that at the current time, you cannot budget for account transfers in Quicken Mac. While this is technically accurate from an accounting standpoint (a transfer of funds from your checking account, an asset, to your loan account, a liability, is not an expense), what most people want is to be able to budget for the cash flow impact of the loan payment. This is one of the top user requests, garnering more than 460 votes, and the developers have said that they will implement a way to do this. (You can no longer add your vote to the thread, because it has been marked "Planned".) We just don't know when this feature will appear.