How do you select accounts and add transfers into budgets? (Q Mac)

Chaos Unlimited

I stopped budgeting a few years ago and I am trying to restart. I can't find the functionality that I used to select the accounts to include in the budget and track transfers outside of those accounts. I only include the spending accounts and can set budget of transfers to savings, 401K, etc. Each month I net out the budget to zero (Income - Expenses - Transfers to savings = 0). I bring money in by transfer to cover months with high expenses and move money into savings during months with low expenses. I was very successful with this method and it was the best functionality in Quicken. It allowed me to maximize savings to buy our house and pay for college for the kids. I want to do this budgeting again to prepare for retirement but I can't figure out how to do it.

John_in_NC

You won't be able to accomplish what you want with the current Quicken budget in Quicken for Mac.

All accounts are currently included in the budget and there is no way to select individual accounts to include/exclude. Moreover, the budget won't see transfers as the net value of transfer transactions will be zero.

Chaos Unlimited

Thanks for giving me the bad news straight.

This budgeting method allowed me to be come financially stable and set my family up for our future financial needs. It is sad that functionality I used in Quicken for 20 years (1987-2007) is not available today.

I did have an idea that might allow me to track the transfers. If I change from two way transfers to new expense and income categories ("to 401K" and "from paycheck"), I could include the expense leaving the pay check in the budget and exclude the income entering the 401K. That would make the budget show the transfer leaving. It might work but I will have some additional work to do to make it sustainable.

I will try it and post results.

Chaos Unlimited

I found a way to do the important half of what I want to do!

I built a summary report that will allow me to the zero based spending analysis (just without the budget amounts). I customized the report. Under "accounts", I selected only the accounts that are my spending accounts (Cash, Checking and Credit Cards). Under "Advanced", I selected "include only transfers with accounts outside of report."and show transfers out of the report.

It lists all the Income, expenses and transfers then it lists the total = Income - expenses - transfers. Now I can drive the total to zero each month just the way I used to.

The only thing that is missing on the report is the budget amounts but I'll take half a loaf.

smithtm1225

The inability to select accounts for budgeting purposes has me thinking about finding another tool. I find it astonishing that something this simple is not available to Apple users.

Are there plans to fix this?

smayer97

It has been acknowledged that Quicken is working on this here (Add Ability to Include or Exclude Transfers on Budgets) and here (Add Ability to Include or Exclude Accounts on Budgets)  as some of the top requested features.

Unfortunately, no timeline is given but has been acknowledged as a large effort to implement.