Budget Amount Displaying Incorrectly On Mobile App

System

This discussion was created from comments split from: mobile and online budget not matching the desktop version.

mwelker

on the mobile app, for one of my budget categories, "Books", it says "$25 out of $74 $49 Left" on the "Personal Expenses" page, but when I click on it to see the list of transactions, they total $52.97. On the desktop version, the budget report correctly shows that I've spent $52.97 out of $73.96 in that category. All of the transactions are from "Cash" accounts under "Banking." And that's not the only category in which this is happening. For several other categories, all of the transactions are in the app and they match what's on the desktop version, but their sum total doesn't match what the app's budget summary screen says for that category.

bsvantho

I have complained about this issue several several times to Quicken support already, they have not offered a solution. See attached screen shot - spending is at $0 even though there are several transactions. Problem is consistent in both mobile and web versions, no problem on desktop. I did not have this issue using Quicken for Windows 2017. I upgraded and am using the same budget I have used for two years.

Note that the problem is with any category that uses sub-categories but only has a budget set for the main category. For instance in the screenshot 'Spending.Restaurants' is a sub-category. The budget amount of $3400 is set for the Spending category and should capture all sub-category spending.

I had to work around this issue because the budgeting was useless if the amount is always $0. The work around is to put Spending and all of its sub-categories in its own budget Group. It is annoying to do it this way, but it at least works now.

UKR

Budgets in Quicken supposedly work the other way around.

You budget individually for each subcategory and let these amounts roll up to form a total for the parent category.

There's no trickle down from parent to sub category. And if there was, how much of the $3400 should go to each of the subcategories?

For best results, you may want to work with budgets in Quicken on your desktop / laptop and use budgets on your mobile app only for reference: "Can I afford to spend more on Dining Out this month?"
You may also want to Reset Sync on your desktop / laptop after having reviewed and changed your budgets, to upload a complete file to the Sync server.

bsvantho

> @UKR said:
> Budgets in Quicken supposedly work the other way around.
> You budget individually for each subcategory and let these amounts roll up to form a total for the parent category.There's no trickle down from parent to sub category. And if there was, how much of the $3400 should go to each of the subcategories?
> For best results, you may want to work with budgets in Quicken on your desktop / laptop and use budgets on your mobile app only for reference: "Can I afford to spend more on Dining Out this month?"
> You may also want to Reset Sync on your desktop / laptop after having reviewed and changed your budgets, to upload a complete file to the Sync server.

It works either way. If you select only the main category in 'Manage Budget Categories' you can specify a budget for the category as long as the subcategories are not selected. Then any spending in the subcategories will be taken out of that budget. Try it and you will see it works fine in the desktop version. For me it is too cumbersome to set a budget for every single subcategory so I lump discretionary spending into one monthly budget for flexibility. If I buy a pair of shoes or dine out doesn't matter to me, it comes out of the same budget. If I want to see the detailed spending in reports I still can as each transaction still has sub category information. Works great and much easier to manage. I do use the mobile app for reference ( it is so unreliable I would not trust it for anything else), but it is useless if the amount spent is always $0.

Anyway I have done it this way for years and it works for me. It was the update to the 2020 version that broke it on the phone app ( and the web). I have reset the cloud, I have signed out/in, I have deleted the cloud file and re-synced, I have created a new data file, I have done the secret super-validation - still the same. You can see in the screenshot from my previous post there are transactions from several sub categories. Even the ones that are directly in Spending category are not being counted, so there is clearly something going wrong.