Mortgage Payment not showing in budget

System

This discussion was created from comments split from: What category do you use when transferring funds between two accounts and two budgets?.

rtoro

my issue is between my checking account and my mortgage accounts on quicken. my mortgage payment is broken down into several categories, i.e. payment, interest, insurance and taxes. The payment portion which is a transfer to the mortgage account is does not get recognized by the budget.

jacobs

What you're seeing -- that the payment of the principal on your loan isn't showing in your budget -- is the way Quicken Mac currently works. From an accounting perspective, payment of principal is not an expense -- it's a transfer of funds from an asset (your checking account) to a liability (your loan).

But from a personal finance perspective, of course people want to be able to see the full amount of their loan payment(s) reflected in their budget. You can't currently do this, unless you resort to some cumbersome workarounds involving creating bogus entries to categorize the principal payments. (Personally, I think it's easier to just know how much you need to add for loan payments to your Quicken budget bottom line each month than to create complicated workarounds which then mess up other reports in Quicken -- but different users prefer different approaches to this.)

The good news is that the product manager for Quicken Mac has acknowledged that many users have asked for the ability to include transfers in budgets, and has said they will add such functionality in a future release -- we just don't know when it will become available. 

chitownhockey

Wouldn't adding a "filter accounts" dropdown in the budget seem to correct this issue? Right now, the issue with the budget is that ALL accounts and ALL transactions from those accounts are included in the budget.

I mean, just allowing users to select which accounts to include in the budget creation process would eliminate the "zeroing out" of transfer transactions.

You would think that selecting only spending accounts, such as savings, checking and credit card accounts would eliminate the problems the Quicken development staff is having implementing a fix for this. Therefore the checking transfers "out" to mortgage and loan accounts "in", along with cash transfers "out" of investment accounts and "in" to cash type accounts, would only have one side of the transfer included in the budget.

And since they have basically done this with all the new reporting features, allowing users to select which accounts to include in the budget, this shouldn't be a huge problem for them.

There...I solved the problem for you Quicken!

jacobs

@chitownhockey Yes, allowing budgeting by accounts would largely solve the problem. That's something Quicken currently can't do, and it apparently involves some major re-writing of the budget code to enable it. As the product manager said in the thread about the latest release, the implementation of cash flow -- transfer -- reporting in some reports is a first step in this process. It's not that they don't understand the issue or know how to solve it, but that is'a a major programming project, and juggling that among all the other requests for functionality means that nothing gets done as quickly as we'd all like. 

chitownhockey

I kind of disagree. Filtering the budget by accounts should really be easy peasy... as any spreadsheet user can attest to. It's a simple filter with a drop down box as to selection.

I'm not gonna argue with you, but it's not a major programming project. It's a simple filter by accounts.

jacobs

Sorry, but you don’t know how the program is built. Budgets are apparently a delicate creation, and filtering by accounts is not easy to implement. So says the product manager, and I’ll take his word over your supposition.