Budget Question

Paul Gerardi

Hi, I understand the concept of a budget is to monitor Income & expenses but how are Mortgages, Auto Pmts, Credit Card payments handled. Everything I've seen deals only with Inc & Exp.

Thanks

jacobs

@Paul Gerardi  Quicken Mac's budgeting is geared towards tracking actual versus budgeted income and expenses, and not cash flow.

You could include Transfers To Credit Card in your budget, but then your actual spending will be doubled, because it will show the individual expenses and the payment of the credit card. 

You could also include Transfers From Checking in your budget, since this would be the oppose amount of the Transfers To Credit Card, so your bottom line will be correct, but you can at least see the funds transfer in your budget. I don't know how useful that would be.

You could set up your budget on a cash flow basis, by including Transfer From Checking, and then excluding all the spending categories you charge on your credit card. But this would be problematic if you have any expense categories with some transactions paid by credit card and some by cash or check. If you don't pay your credit card in full, this would let you budget what your actual outflow of funds will be, but won't give you a true measure of your actual spending because it would only track what you're paying and not what you're spending.

You might find that creating two budgets -- one based on actual spending, and one simplified one base don cash flow -- might be able to give you the best of both worlds. I just don't know that there's any way to do it all in one budget.

jacobs

One of the feature enhancements in Quicken Mac this year has been the ability to include Transfers between accounts in your budget. If you look at the Category list when you editor your budget, you'll see "Transfers In" and "Transfers Out" with all your accounts under each of those headings. So if you selected your Banking (cash and credit card) accounts, and included Transfer To: Mortgage, Transfers To: Auto Loan, etc., you'll have budget lines for those cash flows.

For credit cards, the expenses are counted in your budget with the individual transactions in each credit card account, so you wouldn't want to budget for the transfer from checking to the credit card, as that would double-count all your credit card expenses. If you really just wanted to budget the cash flow, you could exclude your credit card accounts from your budget and include the Transfer To: Credit Card to have a line in your budget for your card payment. But then you wouldn't have anything in your budget for what those credit card charges were spent on, which is why I said you wouldn't want to set it up this way.

Paul Gerardi

Thanks for your response, I am a bit confused though. Is there somewhere here that I can learn more about transfers?

Quicken_Tyka

Hello @Paul Gerardi

Thank you for the response, you may learn more about transfers in the Quicken Help as well as the support article available here.

To locate the in-product help, please navigate to Help > Quicken Help. You can then search "Transfer" to learn more.

Please let us know if you have any additional questions.

-Quicken Tyka

Paul Gerardi

Thanks for the reply, in other words the transfer in Budgeting works exactly the same as it does when recording actual transactions?

jacobs

@Paul Gerardi  I'm not sure I understand your question. Budgets can selectively show transfers into and/or out of accounts.

Paul Gerardi

What I am trying accomplish is to budget my CC balances and or loan transactions. I would like to budget for cash flow not just income/expenses.

jacobs

@Paul Gerardi  Quicken Mac's budgeting is geared towards tracking actual versus budgeted income and expenses, and not cash flow.

You could include Transfers To Credit Card in your budget, but then your actual spending will be doubled, because it will show the individual expenses and the payment of the credit card. 

You could also include Transfers From Checking in your budget, since this would be the oppose amount of the Transfers To Credit Card, so your bottom line will be correct, but you can at least see the funds transfer in your budget. I don't know how useful that would be.

You could set up your budget on a cash flow basis, by including Transfer From Checking, and then excluding all the spending categories you charge on your credit card. But this would be problematic if you have any expense categories with some transactions paid by credit card and some by cash or check. If you don't pay your credit card in full, this would let you budget what your actual outflow of funds will be, but won't give you a true measure of your actual spending because it would only track what you're paying and not what you're spending.

You might find that creating two budgets -- one based on actual spending, and one simplified one base don cash flow -- might be able to give you the best of both worlds. I just don't know that there's any way to do it all in one budget.