Budget Transaction

mhoran17

Hi,
New to Quicken..leaving Excel for increased capabilities. In my monthly budget i maintain line items for vehicle maintenance, registration and insurance. Rather than maintain those dollar values in my checking i transfer to my savings. My question is how do include the amount transferred as a line item in my budget. As is, when i transfer the money...it shows as a transfer to savings and isn't shown as a budget item completed. Any help or work around would be greatly appreciated.

Chris_QPW

My personal recommendation is that you don't budget the transfer.  For the most part when you start talking about transfers you are really talking about cash flow (or maybe a saving goal), not a budget.

Taking your example there is two ways to budget for such items.  One would be that for the registration and insurance budget them in the month they are paid.  In the case of vehicle maintenance you can't do that because you don't know when it coming, and of course it also sounds like for the registration and insurance you are doing the same thing.  So instead you need a way where money is "accumulating".  But note for a budget it shouldn't matter what account is used to pay for something (that is cash flow).  For instance it shouldn't matter to your budget if you used your checking account, savings account or credit card to pay for the expense, you "budgeted to pay it".  You budget categories.

To "accumulate", use "rollovers" by selecting this icon:

Now with that been said you can budget transfers in Quicken (which is mostly used to do things like capture the "expense" of paying the principal part of a loan), but I think you will find that it isn't going to work for your use case.

If you select "Manage Budget Categories" you will see Transfers in and Transfers Out.  This is where you would budget it.  But basically for this to work that savings account would have to be dedicated to this one purpose.  Because every transfer into it is going to go into this "category" that you are budgeting for.

BTW for cash flow kinds of decisions you should be using reminders and the projected balances graph.

Chris_QPW

My personal recommendation is that you don't budget the transfer.  For the most part when you start talking about transfers you are really talking about cash flow (or maybe a saving goal), not a budget.

Taking your example there is two ways to budget for such items.  One would be that for the registration and insurance budget them in the month they are paid.  In the case of vehicle maintenance you can't do that because you don't know when it coming, and of course it also sounds like for the registration and insurance you are doing the same thing.  So instead you need a way where money is "accumulating".  But note for a budget it shouldn't matter what account is used to pay for something (that is cash flow).  For instance it shouldn't matter to your budget if you used your checking account, savings account or credit card to pay for the expense, you "budgeted to pay it".  You budget categories.

To "accumulate", use "rollovers" by selecting this icon:

Now with that been said you can budget transfers in Quicken (which is mostly used to do things like capture the "expense" of paying the principal part of a loan), but I think you will find that it isn't going to work for your use case.

If you select "Manage Budget Categories" you will see Transfers in and Transfers Out.  This is where you would budget it.  But basically for this to work that savings account would have to be dedicated to this one purpose.  Because every transfer into it is going to go into this "category" that you are budgeting for.

BTW for cash flow kinds of decisions you should be using reminders and the projected balances graph.

mhoran17

Good points... I will radjust. Thanks a lot.