Rollover Budgets Experience

chris.olson

Hey all,

I'm a long time Mint user and just made the jump to Quicken last week after Mint lost years worth of my data!

I've enjoyed it for the most part but one area that has seemed to be really lacking for me has been the rollover budgets. I started with Quicken for Mac only to find out that they don't have rollover budget functionality which was a big surprise. I re-setup all my accounts in Windows and it works great on the desktop client but when it syncs to mobile and web i've had nothing but problems. I manually adjusted my rollover amounts on desktop but there seem to be a lot of bugs when it tries to sync to mobile and web. A lot of those manually adjustment don't get reflected.

I was just curious what everyone else's experience has been in relation to with this.

Chris_QPW

I only "use" the web/mobile for testing to try to help people at times, and here is what I see on testing this.

1. The rollover is handled wrong.  Say I put in $50 for the rollover in January (which is "from the month before") and $15 for budget and $13 for the expense.  The Desktop correctly shows a balance of $52.  The web shows a balance of $2.  Note when it gets to February that $50 does carry over here.
2. On the setting/changing of the rollover amounts, it is absolutely bizarre.  It seems to update at "random times" and "random months".  Even logging off and back on doesn't see to make a difference.  I even tried turning the rollover off, syncing on both, and turning it back on and syncing on both, and still I would see some of the values not updating.  And then at almost random times they will up (at least some of them).
   

Snowman

It has been my experience to not EVER sync to mobile or web.  There are just too many things that can go wrong and do.  It is better to keep everything on your desktop computer.  I have used Quicken for 20 years and I dabbled with the mobile and web connections and there were just too many issues that frankly are beyond the user's control.

Chris_QPW

I only "use" the web/mobile for testing to try to help people at times, and here is what I see on testing this.

1. The rollover is handled wrong.  Say I put in $50 for the rollover in January (which is "from the month before") and $15 for budget and $13 for the expense.  The Desktop correctly shows a balance of $52.  The web shows a balance of $2.  Note when it gets to February that $50 does carry over here.
2. On the setting/changing of the rollover amounts, it is absolutely bizarre.  It seems to update at "random times" and "random months".  Even logging off and back on doesn't see to make a difference.  I even tried turning the rollover off, syncing on both, and turning it back on and syncing on both, and still I would see some of the values not updating.  And then at almost random times they will up (at least some of them).
   

chris.olson

Chris_QPW, that is pretty much exactly what I've been seeing also. At least I'm not alone in this. I'm hoping these are just some growing pains as Quicken begins transitioning more to mobile. The desktop app is great but the world is going to the cloud and mobile for everything. It will be interesting to see how Quicken handles this. With the introduction of Simplifi it makes me wonder what their plan is for Quicken long term

Chris_QPW

chris.olson said:

Chris_QPW, that is pretty much exactly what I've been seeing also. At least I'm not alone in this. I'm hoping these are just some growing pains as Quicken begins transitioning more to mobile. The desktop app is great but the world is going to the cloud and mobile for everything. It will be interesting to see how Quicken handles this. With the introduction of Simplifi it makes me wonder what their plan is for Quicken long term

Well I will say that from where it started, they have made quite a bit of progress on the web/mobile (seems like more on the web than the mobile), so it is possible that they might fix things like this in the future.

There are a number of "stumbling blocks" in their way from I can see.

One is just what you noted, that Quicken Mac doesn't have this feature "yet".  As in the two different Desktop Quicken's have different feature sets, and the web/mobile has to work with both of them.  Another example of this is that most long term Quicken Windows Desktop users don't use automatic transaction entry mode, and of course Quicken Mac, web, mobile doesn't have this "non automatic" mode at all.  So I think that is another "conflict" for long time Quicken Windows users to use the web/mobile. 

Another big problem is data file corruption during sync.  The sync works "magically"/automatically in the background, giving the user no way to see what was done or to control what is applied.  When Quicken Mobile came out it was pretty much guaranteed to corrupt your data file.  It is much better now, but there is still enough reports of strange things happen that I doubt any long time users (including beta testers) do any real testing on it, and certainly not use it for their day to day activity.  This means the testing by people that might take the time to really dig in and get good feedback to Quicken Inc is probably lacking.

Frankly from my standpoint the main reason I don't use it is because I have no need for it.  I don't travel much, and if I did I would just bring a laptop with Quicken Desktop on it.  And my finances are setup so that I don't have know the exact balance every account or such details when I'm running around town (if I did I would problem use the financial institution's app, not Quicken's).  If I had more use of it, I would probably "risk" syncing, with the hope that my backups would be enough to get me out of any problems I run into.

I know that this is true for automatic transaction entry mode.  Long time Quicken Windows users (especially the SuperUsers) do not use this mode.  So that leaves the new users that get it by default (and from what I can see, me to use it and find/report bugs).  And of course they are much less likely to report the problem, and even less report it in a form that a developer can work on (as in show how to reproduce it).

I think the SuperUsers are pretty sick of me pointing out that just because a user has a problem with the wrong category being selected that doesn't mean that the automatic transaction entry mode is at fault, and thing like that.  It is sort of like where Quicken Support will jump to "Well I don't know how to fix that, start a new data file".  The SuperUsers response is always "Turn off automatic entry mode.".