Budget: Parent rollup and non-discretionary expense grouping

1lilpig

Ok. This topic has been around for years. Issue is subcategories and parent category both have actual amounts. The detail budget view cannot in all cases reflect the correct rollover amount in the YTD column. It appears to omit some/all of the amounts posted to the parent category. I understand and can see that in Personal Expenses there is an "other" subcategory that can be selected which will capture the amounts posted directly to the parent category to enable the program to compute the category YTD rollover correctly. There is no such option that I can find in the Non-Discretionary section. How do I get the non-discretionary parent rollups to "foot"?

Chris_QPW

Is "Non-Discretionary" a category group?

If so it is a group and as such there isn't any way to put anything into it except categories.  It is the categories that have parent and subcategories (and the "other").

For instance looking at this:

Variable Expenses is the category group.  And Auto is a category, and Fuel is a subcategory of Auto.

Maybe this what you are referring to.

If I look to select categories and I select my Variable Expenses category group I see:

Notice there isn't an "other" to select under Auto. The reason is because I didn't select it in the category group.

If I select it like below:

Then go back to selecting categories in the budget:

Selecting other above:

1lilpig

Ok. Under the select categories to budget section, I have a "non-discretionary" category grouping (actual my "category groups" look a bit different than yours which is puzzling.) The categories under this Non-Discretionary group do not have a sub-category of other. The categories under the Personal Expenses group have this "Other" subcategory but not the Non-Discretionary. If I knew how to post the screenshots I would.

1lilpig

Just saw the rest of your screenshots. I attempted to assign an "Other" subcategory from Personal Expenses to Non-Discretionary but when I tried to select say Auto-Other in Personal Expenses to assign it to Non-Discretionary, the entire budget blew up and a lost 100% of all my Non-Discretionary budgeted categories and amounts. Had to manually restore it all. So something didn't go quite right.....

1lilpig

The non-discretionary grouping will create an "everything else" subcategory on its on when items are posted to the parent category. So it reflects the amount posted to the parent and everything will foot in the month the expense occurs but the rollover does not work correctly on the subsequent months. Hope this makes sense. Without screen shots I know it's hard.

Chris_QPW

From what I understand until you get enough points to get the button to add images you can drag and drop images in the comment (at least that is what one moderator said).

On the category groups.

There are a few built in ones like "Personal Expenses", but others can be added/renamed using the Add/Rename Custom Groups.  "Variable Expenses" is a custom group I created.

And on non-discretionary, frankly I'm at a loss of where that comes from.  I have seen it mentioned lots of times, and as you can see I don't have it in my data file, and when I create a new data file it isn't one of the built-in category groups.  If your data file is very old maybe it is some kind carry over, but my data file goes back to 1996.

Here is what I get in a new data file.

1lilpig

Thank you. I have always had a non-discretionary category. It was Q created and maybe sources to back in the day - I go back to 1994 with Q. I didn't start budgeting until the last couple years and it always popped up on my list of category groups. So I've used it. Just can't get it to roll or foot worth a "d###" with the "everything else" Q created sub-category. Hopefully one of the Q folks sees this and can opine and provide some help. Many thanks.

Chris_QPW

@1lilpig yes hopefully someone that has a better idea of what is going on will jump in, but I did what to leave you with one thought.  Quicken has several inconsistencies between the Graph view, Annual view, and Budget reports, and one of those inconsistencies is the "Everything Else" on the Graph View.  As in the Annual view doesn't have it at all.

I understand the reasoning behind "Everything Else" wanting to make sure that a user doesn't "miss" anything, but it really gets in the way of customizing the budget exactly how you want, so I almost entirely use the Annual view instead.

1lilpig

This is the Annual view (the "spreadsheet" format", not the Graph view - I never could make practical sense of that one! So I've always used Annual view with Details selected. I rarely, if ever, print the budget reports.

And this "Everything Else" only shows up in this Non-Discretionary category grouping. The "other" in Personal Expenses works just fine for rollovers and parent totals, etc. But I can't get this "Everything Else" to work. Very odd.

I'm guessing it is some legacy function that never got fixed/updated that somehow still appears with my data files.

Many thanks for all the help though.

Chris_QPW

Wow!  What a pain, and it sounds like that Non-Discretionary is considered a built-in category group, and as such always shows up like Personal Expenses does.

1lilpig

I'm thinking. But as I continue to dig around I just noticed somewhere that it is considered a custom group. Probably from back in the day trying to create some split in fixed and variable type expenses for reporting/analysis.....

I do see that my Non-Discretionary has a LOT more subcategories, categories and detail in general than my Personal Expenses does.

Chris_QPW

If it isn't considered a built-in category group what I would try is creating a new one and transferring the needed categories to it, and then delete the Non-Discretionary category group.

1lilpig

Hmmmm. I wonder.... (as I kill another day on this!).....I wonder if I could re-assign all my Non-Discretionary categories to Personal and then re-create another equivalent to Non-Discretionary and be able to pull the Other sub-categories over to this new ND group...... Hmmmm.

1lilpig

OMG. I was typing the above when you posted that. Great minds and all that. Thank you sooo very much for your help.

Chris_QPW

Seems like we had the same thought, at the same time. 

1lilpig

The only place I find Non-Discretionary even mentioned is as a Category Group that operates as almost a default if you don't want to use separate categories to budget. If you want to budget strictly by group. It was a built-in at some point in time because I never created it, I probably just assigned accounts to it....