Why does my income budget need to be negative to balance?

Blackestnight47

I totally understand why I would enter my expense budget as negative, but I do not know why my income must be negative to achieve what I need. It makes the budget for the month negative but the annual budget total is correct. I added a screenshot of what I have.

Blackestnight47

@Chris_QPW I had it in DETAIL view but the 'show detail for future months' was unchecked at the bottom.

GeoffG

You should be entering both income and expenses as positive values. Quicken is smart enough to know one from the other. By entering negative values for expenses, you are forcing income values to be negative as well to balance.

Blackestnight47

Okay I did that. Now why is my summary balance at the end of income showing negative? Is this how budgeting works with Quicken? Screenshot attached.

GeoffG

You need to expand the + to see what is causing the negative value in the total. Some value is incorrect.

Blackestnight47

No negatives..

GeoffG

Clearly this is not normal. I would start by zeroing out each months values for each category to see if the total also zeros out. If you cannot get all the values to zero, I would run a file validation to check for data corruption. File>File Operations>Validate.

Chris_QPW

This is very strange and like @GeoffG suggest might be data corruption.



You will notice that the month columns are showing the budget, but the last column is showing the balance.  This shouldn't be possible.

Example:

Blackestnight47

I think I figured it out.. It's my view. When I have it on 'budget only', I get what I am looking for. I believe the detail view shows under and over budget by variance possibly. I need to play with it more. Thank you for taking the time to help. I learn something new about the file validation, in case for the future.

Chris_QPW

Well what did you have selected to get the the display you have in your first screenshot?

Because here is what I see for every setting.
Details:


Balance only:


Budget Only:


Actuals Only:


What you will notice is that none of the above have it where the month is "BUDGET" and the last column is "BALANCE", like it is in your screenshot.

Blackestnight47

@Chris_QPW I had it in DETAIL view but the 'show detail for future months' was unchecked at the bottom.

Chris_QPW

OK.  That explains it.  Thanks.