How to roll 2020 actuals & categories to 2021 budget?

Barbara B

Is this true -- (copied from someone else's post): There is no way to roll the actual spending/income balances forward to a new year. They will reset will all three options. (In other words, there is no ability to carryover).

I'm doing this on the first day of 2021 so there shouldn't be any 'averaging' as I experienced when trying to create the new budget in the last few days of 2020.

Or is there a way?

If not, is this an enhancement we should ask for?

Thanks for any help given.

bmciance

That is correct.  You cannot carry over any balances from last year to this year's budget automatically.

Sherlock

To set the budget up for the next year, I suggest you attempt to view the next year in the budget view.  Quicken should offer you the option to use the actuals for the budget values:



If you have previously chose to use the original budget values in the budget before creating a copy of the budget, the only way to reset the budget would be to restore a backup of the Quicken file saved before you set the budget for next year. If you didn't make the change recently, I suggest you renter the budget values manually.

Chris_QPW

From what I can see Quicken is "inconsistent" on this.  And what's more I don't think that the question was fully understood judging by @Sherlock 's answer.

This would only apply to categories that are already set for rollovers.  The ones that have these symbols in them:


This is because only these categories would have any rollovers from December 2020.

The options above aren't for rollovers.  They are for how to set the budget numbers.

In the annual view if you set it to "display only" you can see information about the rollovers by clicking on the amount in a given month.


Here is where the "inconsistency" comes in. All of my rollovers were reset to zero with the exception of one, "Internet" wasn't, I have no idea why.

But you will notice that the one above is neither the Internet category and it has its rollover set (and I didn't edit it).  The way that happened is if you go to such a category and click on the rollover icon you will get this menu.


Clicking on the Undo all rollover edits... will get you the December/2020 number.

So is like "Quicken edited" these numbers, and now you are resetting them back.

If I was writing a feature request it would be to have an check box option that in this dialog that says something like this:

Select to reset rollovers for 2021.

RickQuick

This is a real feature letdown. Businesses routinely budget for next year by using last year's actuals and tweaking.

Been using Quicken for decades. Never budgeted, never held to a budget. Retiring in 2021, and would like to set a budget to measure against, but I want to use 2020 actuals, then finetune them. I cannot believe this can't be done.

Chris_QPW

@RickQuick Quicken has that feature, as already pointed out by other answers in this thread.



The feature that is missing/partly there is what the original question was about.
For each category you can choose to turn on the "rollover" feature.  As in the amount in the budget not used this month rolls over to the next month.

But when it gets to the next year Quicken resets the rollover amount to zero when copying to the next year (no matter which of the three above options you use to set the budget numbers).

The "partial" part is that you can click on the rollover icon in next year and select to "undo" the edits and get the rollover amount from the last year.

RickQuick

I am never presented with the choices shown in that box.

Chris_QPW

@RickQuick Oh, that is a different question/problem.

When a person delays "extending" their budget into the next year and just opens a budget in the new year Quicken doesn't give you a choice! (which I think is a bug!).

What you need to do is set your system clock back to December 31/2020 and load in a  backup of your data file from that time before you opened it in this year.  Then use the arrow key to "extend" into the next year:


Then Quicken will present you with the dialog I posted in the comment above.

RickQuick

Thanks, but that does me no good as I've done extensive work since the beginning of the year that I'm not going to try and recreate.

However, I found a way around it. I did change the date, created a new budget for 2020, then hit the arrow. It seems to have worked, copying the 2020 actuals, although I need to do more checking.

Thank you.

Chris_QPW

Yeah that would work too, and is a better way to go at it given the situation.