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Biweekly Budgeting (17 merged votes)

Getting paid every other week, it'd be nice to be able to create budgets that are in two week chunks. I know I can calculate an average monthly by entering a biweekly amount but I'd much prefer just having the budget be biweekly or whatever period of time you'd like to set.

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Is there a way in quicken to create a 2 week budget? This would be a better way for us to track expenses with the pay periods. Does anyone know the answer for this? I know I can create a monthly budget.

Have you tried using a custom date?

* Open the Budget* Click on the Budget Tab* Select Category* Under "Method", select average amount* Under "Period", select "Every Two Weeks"

biweekly

No, monthly is the standard. Why do you need biweekly?

No, monthly is the standard. Why do you need biweekly?

I would love to see a biweekly budget in Quicken. We are paid bi-weekly so I have to do my allocated spending plan in Excel. My Quicken budget numbers are great for tracking annually, but doesn't do the job for the biweekly budget. I was planning to purchase Quicken 2011, but will wait until it's added.

No, monthly is the standard. Why do you need biweekly?

I can't believe Quicken does not facilitate a bi-weekly budget. A plethora of users get paid bi-weekly, so even though there's no bi-weekly option in Quicken, there needs to some workaround for it. I've tried to play around with it to no avail. Like jlr2002, I have to create a spending plan in Excel for each pay period, and then sum it up for the month. It would be nice if Quicken could do it, then I wouldn't need Excel anymore for my finances!!

No, monthly is the standard. Why do you need biweekly?

I struggled with trying to create a bi-weekly budget for quite some time and then I finally realized that yearly is the way to go. When you get paid bi-weekly a monthly budget doesn't work because some pay periods overlap the monthly boundaries and it's just a mess. A yearly budget on the other hand is exactly divided into 26 bi-weekly periods. In Quicken you can view the budget report using the yearly budget and limit the report to the current pay period and it works pretty good. It's not perfect though. There seems to be errors in Quicken where some of the yearly budget amounts don't get divided exactly by 26 which produces some small errors which are annoying. Hopefully this is fixed in the 2011 version. Hopefully this helps.

No, monthly is the standard. Why do you need biweekly?

Thanks sgh... I tried another solution at the link below and will see how it goes. But I'll try yours too to see if it works better. Thanks again. I just don't understand why Quicken just doesn't have better bi-weekly features.

I been doing the envelope system for a while and each paycheck gets broken out. Is there a way to do a 2 week budget in Quicken 2013 instead of a month?
Thanks for the help!
-Andy

No, only monthly.

For example, a $200 biweekly budget item results in $400 for 10 months and $600 for 2 months each year in terms of cash flow. However the budget tool performs (200*260)/12 and enter that as the monthly budget which does not align with the biweekly paycheck schedule and does not represent the actual cash flow.

There is no Bi-weekly option in the budget module. You have to match monthly income to monthly expenses. Suggestions may by made here: https://www.research.net/r/?sm=9cOc3rwodcapt1xKTYk0cf7SRSYdM1uCbxXTU%2fpPxQo%3d

Although you can't change the budget period to bi-weekly in either QWin or QMac, you can take advantage of the Show Reminders in Register feature.

Show Reminders in Register allows you to layer your upcoming income and bill reminders onto your account register. This shows you the impact to your account balance for each income and bill reminder in the time period you specified to show and enables you to monitor your future cash flow for shortfalls.

[mention://96907 @RonHall42 Q16Prem Win 10] that feedback link is for the Windows version only.
[mention://4286004 @tberrios1] For the Mac version, go here: http://www.quicken.com/mac/feedback

[mention://4286004 [mention://4286004 @tberrios1]]: I think the complexity of different payroll approaches makes it unlikely Quicken will try to offer the wide variety of options it would need to in order to match paychecks. Here's why...

You describe my situation: payroll every two weeks (biweekly). Some people get paid twice a month (bimonthly) to eliminate the two moths a year you and I get a third paycheck, so Quicken would need a bi-monthly pay option in addition to biweekly. But it gets way more complicated for us bi-weekly pay people. Biweekly pay covers 364 days in a year (26 pay periods x 14 days = 364), and there are different approaches companies use to deal with the extra 1 day every year and extra 2 days every leap year. Some companies simply have an extra pay period every 11 years. (They're foolish; they are paying employees more than their true annual salary by doing so -- but I know companies that do this.) Some companies skip a week in those "leap pay years" to keep to only 26 pay periods, each paying 1/26th of annual pay per pay period. (This is what my small company does.) And some companies adjust the number of work days/year every year, which avoids the "leap pay year" but results in employee salaries going up or down from year to year depending on the number of work days/year. (My wife's larger employer does this.) (If you can't tell by now, I deal with payroll at my company, and have wrestled with the problems of bi-weekly pay over the years!) The odds of Quicken programming in all these ways individuals' paychecks may be handled just seems unlikely to me.

So my suggestion is to let Quicken calculate its incorrect monthly amount (dividing total salary by 12), and then just manually fix it: enter your correct pay amount for a month with two periods and copy it to all months, then manually change the two months int he year when you will get the third paycheck (which is easy to figure out by skimming a calendar). It'll take just a minute, and then you're set for a year. Even if you have two or three paychecks coming into your budget, it doesn't take long to set this up once a year.

Thank you for the register reminder and manual recommendations, I will explore both.

Hello, I use Mint not but think I want something with a little more. One of the things I would like to do is be able to have two different budgets like this... Budget one is based on Checking account #1 and handles all the monthly bill and yearly bills. Budget 2 is a day to day budget for everything else (fuel, food, entertainment....). Also, can quicken do budgets on a 26 pay period (as apposed to monthly?) . I know a lot of people get payed bi-weekly and that just doesn't work well in a monthly budget. I find it truly odd that for all the home finance programs out there non have put together all the basics into one easy and affordable program.
Thanks

Sorry, no.

A budget is for everything you have, all accounts, all transactions, etc. (except for accounts marked "Keep Separate from my Net Worth").

And why do you need two budgets anyway? One budget can show you everything you want to know. Try and keep it simple.

I have one checking account I use for monthly bills, its a known set amount that I put in there and it auto drafts from there. The second checking is for everything else. That way I don't get towards the end of the pay check and have to remember that the cable bill will draft before I get paid again so I should hold off on going out to dinner till after I get paid again. In short no unexpected drafts from the checking account that makes me overdraft. I have seen revues that say it can, so I thought I'd ask. If it can't I wont spend the money....
Thanks

Sorry, no.
A budget is for everything you have, all accounts, all transactions, etc. (except for accounts marked "Keep Separate from my Net Worth").
And why do you need two budgets anyway? One budget can show you everything you want to know. Try and keep it simple.

Note you can create multiple budgets in Quicken.

But you can't do some of the things you are trying to do.
For instance the budget views do not allow filtering by account. But the budget reports do.

You can't create budgets on some arbitrary amount of days. The budgets are monthly. Even though one could easily setup a yearly budget by just putting the budget numbers for the year in January.

And frankly people that try to budget using their paycheck period doesn't make any sense. Your bills will not magically line up with your paycheck. And in fact most them will be monthly. You have to budget so that your paycheck lasts the month. That is why you have a checking/savings account. You have to "store" money for when you need it, for what you need. A budget allows you to lay those out so that you know that is possible.

Sorry, no.
A budget is for everything you have, all accounts, all transactions, etc. (except for accounts marked "Keep Separate from my Net Worth").
And why do you need two budgets anyway? One budget can show you everything you want to know. Try and keep it simple.

Total get what your saying and I did that for years. But for me there was /is a problem with the monthly vs bi-weekly because of just that so I switched it up a few years ago to have on checking receive a portion of my direct deposit equal to recurring bills +10%(a buffer to build up to 3 to 6 months of bills expenses). The remainder of my paycheck goes into the other for day to day. I find it much easier to budget paycheck to paycheck in 28 day cycles as I do.so I know that my "requirements" are met and if I skip the night out or something that can go straight to debit reduction. I know its kinda weird and different but it works for me. Now if I can just find a budgeting program with a little flexibility instead of the cookie cutter budget..... ;-)

First: with 28 day cycles, you will end of with 13 "months", that you will have to address.

Second: I have several payments that are monthly. Instead of entering them monthly, I have an alternative. My primary file is my banking account register--BofA xxxx. My second file is Budget. In Budget I input all payments and any entries that are repetitive, with date revised monthly. It is possible to add Reserve entries, with appropriate title, to save for the 6th month biannual payments--increase $$ each month or as needed. On the 31st day, or as needed, copy Budget entries (block and copy), then paste in the last blank space in BofA xxx file. Adjust the values and dates as needed. Sometime before the end of the new month, go to Budget and adjust dates for the next month--Budget will show 0 current balance. For me this is simpler then retyping multiple entries each month. The balance in BofA xxxx file shows balance available for miscellaneous spending.

This is similar to Timothy's description, but I combine all payments into one file. If you reconcile, two, or more separate files, it requires extra steps to combine numbers from two files.

If there are other variations of budgeting, I would be curious to hear about them.

From C. D. Bales:

First of all you can make pretty much as many budgets as you like in Quicken.

While Quicken does not allow you to permanently "assign" a budget to an account (or an account to a budget), that does not prevent you from creating a budget intended for a specific account (or for some subset of accounts). Which includes creating a separate budget for every account in your Quicken file, if you wish.

Quicken has no idea, and does not care, what actual data you will compare to any budget you create.

When you enter amounts in the "budget", you are the one (the only one) who knows what those amounts will later be compared to ... when you run a budget REPORT which uses that budget and compares it to the actual amounts from whatever account(s) you select for the report.

The ability to see "actual" amounts in Quicken budgets is a relatively recent addition - and an addition that creates more confusion than it is worth. For starters: because you can't tell Quicken which account(s) the actual amounts should come from in the budget.

While it might be beneficial, there is no necessity to see the actual amounts in the budget - for many years, it was impossible to do so; yet users successfully created budgets. Not seeing the actual amounts in the budget will not stop you from creating a budget and using it to compare to whatever account(s) you choose when you run budget reports.

I would like see a preference setting to allow Quicken to use a fiscal week instead of the standard calendar week. So I could customize the weeks displayed in the calendar to start on my payday; in order to better track weekly budgets. This would also make reports that are broken down into weekly numbers more meaningful.

Your payday is on a fiscal week schedule?

Not exactly what I meant. My wife and I get paid on opposite Fridays. If I want to see a report for a weekly budget; Track a weekly income vs expenses; or view the balance trend in our checking account in the calendar. They all start on Sunday and end on Saturday. I would like to have a way to set a preference to change that so they all start on Friday and end on Thursday. That way the weekly reports make more sense.

Not exactly what I meant. My wife and I get paid on opposite Fridays. If I want to see a report for a weekly budget; Track a weekly income vs expenses; or view the balance trend in our checking account in the calendar. They all start on Sunday and end on Saturday. I would like to have a way to set a preference to change that so they all start on Friday and end on Thursday. That way the weekly reports make more sense.

Can't you customize the report and use a Custom Date?

Therefore, you can select ANY start date and end date you want.

Not exactly what I meant. My wife and I get paid on opposite Fridays. If I want to see a report for a weekly budget; Track a weekly income vs expenses; or view the balance trend in our checking account in the calendar. They all start on Sunday and end on Saturday. I would like to have a way to set a preference to change that so they all start on Friday and end on Thursday. That way the weekly reports make more sense.

JC, have you tried showing reminders in the account register? It enables you to see the impact to your cash balance from upcoming deposits and bills.

Not exactly what I meant. My wife and I get paid on opposite Fridays. If I want to see a report for a weekly budget; Track a weekly income vs expenses; or view the balance trend in our checking account in the calendar. They all start on Sunday and end on Saturday. I would like to have a way to set a preference to change that so they all start on Friday and end on Thursday. That way the weekly reports make more sense.

GoHawks - Customize reports will work if I
want to only see that one week. Plus, who wants to go through the hassle of
running a custom report every time, I know I don't. However, running a
report/graph something like Income vs Spending: year to date or Month to date
with interval set to week. That will be Sun – Sat.

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