Feedback for Quicken's Mac Engineering Teams

theorygeek

I just wanted to pass along some feedback for the Quicken for Mac engineering teams. I recently downloaded Quicken for Mac and there are a couple of items where I don't understand how to accomplish what I want.

It all centers around the budget tools:

1. It'd be great to have the "Details" view on the Budget like the Windows version has. For example, when I'm editing my budget, I can't:
- See my upcoming bills. Editing your budget opens a modal, so you can't interact with the rest of the app.
- See which line items are over/under budget. The edit modal only shows the budget amount, not your actuals.

2. It's difficult to visualize my savings with my budget. On Windows, you can use the "Rollover" feature to carry unused money into the next month. That lets you budget for an average amount each month, and money accumulates until you need it.

For example, with Amazon Prime, I pay $119 in July. I tried to rig something up so that I budget $10/month, transfer it to savings to make it look like an "expense," and transfer it back in July to make it look like "income." But transfer transactions are excluded from the budget.

3. It's not obvious when I have a problem with my budget. It would be awesome if each budget cell had:
- Warnings when the budget won't cover the upcoming bills/transactions for that category
- Errors when you've spent more than you budgeted

(The cells do have little progress bars under them, I think that's too subtle.)

4. Lots of financial podcasts these days advocate the Envelope System. I'm using Quicken because I want more flexibility - I don't want to wait until the funds are literally in my account before I start planning out what I should do with them.

But I still like the concept of, "Give every dollar a job." It'd be nice if someone could write a help article showing how you could envelope budgeting in Quicken. There just seem to be some holes in this story:
- YNAB gives you a four-step process: Give each dollar a job, budget for your periodic expenses, update your budget when life happens, live on last month's income.
- What's the Quicken story? You sorta just "figure it out" and "choose your own adventure" when you open the app. Maybe you stumble into Bill Pay (which is awesome btw!) and set up recurring expenses, and then maybe start playing around with the budget.

All of the How-To guides I can find on Quicken's website are basically telling me, "Here's how to hook up your bank account." But what happens next? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We need some more thorough guides on how to incorporate Quicken into your daily life. I want something a lot more powerful and flexible than YNAB, but I think there still needs to be a guide on what using Quicken looks like from a practical (rather than technical) perspective.

smayer97

The best way to provide feedback for enhancements is to first review existing IDEA threads and add your vote to those. Any idea that does not exist, you can create your own thread for EACH idea separately. This way others can vote on the ideas so Quicken can gauge the demand for such an idea.

Some of what you are asking already exists in the IDEA section. Take a look here:

Budgets and Planning Tools (Mac)

For all other ideas, see this section:

Product Ideas - Quicken for Mac

smayer97

The best way to provide feedback for enhancements is to first review existing IDEA threads and add your vote to those. Any idea that does not exist, you can create your own thread for EACH idea separately. This way others can vote on the ideas so Quicken can gauge the demand for such an idea.

Some of what you are asking already exists in the IDEA section. Take a look here:

Budgets and Planning Tools (Mac)

For all other ideas, see this section:

Product Ideas - Quicken for Mac

theorygeek

Thanks, I didn’t know about those threads.

smayer97

ywc