Sub-total column not adding up correctly in budget

Taggart77

Hi,
This is perplexing. I'm trying to edit a budget. Three different months with the same exact expenses are adding up to be different amounts. I tried setting all the sub-columns to zero. Still, they don't add up correctly. I'm including screenshots. Is this a bug?

Thank you

MontanaKarl

What version of Quicken Mac are you using?  (You've posted in the Mac forum.)  In Version 6.1.0 (and recent releases) there is no place in the Budget window that looks like your screenshots, so it is hard to suggest what might be going on.

jacobs

@MontanaKarl  Isn't that the Edit Budget screen? the only difference from what I see is that the screenshots have a slight shadow under each box which I'm not seeing, but I wonder if that depends on macOS version (I'm two behind, on Mojave). Otherwise, it looks like Edit budget, with the light blue highlighted row being a main category and the white rows underneath being sub-categories.

@Taggart77 Unfortunately, I can't quite tell what I'm supposed to be seeing from these screenshots. the blue row is a category which has sub-categories, but I don't know if the rows underneath are subcategories of the category, and all the subcategories of that category.

One thing that can confusing is that you can enter a different value for a main category than the sum of the sub-categories. Why would Quicken allow this? Because Quickness's allows you to have income or expenses to a main category in addition to sub-categories.

So if I have a category for Auto, and sub-categories for Fuel and for Repairs, I can categorize expenses for Auto:Fuel and Auto:Repairs -- but I can also have expenses just to Auto. Maybe I got a car wash, and that's neither Fuel nor a Repair, and I don't want o create a separate sub-category for my occasional car wash, so I just categorize it as Auto. (Personally, I find this can get confusing, so for any categories for which I have sub-categories, I always try to sub-categorize. I actually wish Quicken had an option to require sub-categorizing in a category which has sub-categories. But I digress…) Well, the budget mirrors this way of working. If you enter values into sub-categories, it will increase or decrease the main category accordingly. But if you edit the main category value, it will accept that. Let me illustrate:

Here's a main category and three sub-categories in my Edit Budget screen. All zeros:


Now, I've filled in some values for the three sub-categories:

I entered $10, $15 and $2, and Quicken helpfully displays the sum of $27 on the main category cell.

But look what happens if I type a value in the main category cell:

I have what appears to be an irregularity: three sub-categories which add up to $27, yet the main category shows $100. That's because Quicken is allowing me to budget for expenses to the main category (like my car wash example above), so it allows me to type a value in the main category which isn't the sum of the sub-categories. 

It can get even more confusing if you then edit your sub-categories. Quicken will again, trying to be helpful, adjust the main category total by the amount of the change you enter in the subcategory. So here, I've changed my first sub-category amount from $10 to $123 -- an increase of $113 -- and Quicken adds $113 to my main category amount:


So here's a quick check for you to try, @Taggart77 : Click in one of the main category (blue) cells, press delete to wipe out the value, and press Return. The value displayed should now be reset to the sum of the sub-categories visible below. Here's what happen when I do that in the cell showing $123:



After wiping out the $213 value which was there, pressing Return caused Quicken to enter the sum of the three sub-categories as the amount in the main category.

This can be a little hard to wrap your head around at first, but once you see what's happening, it should allow you to make edits to your budget that reflect what you want in your budget.

MontanaKarl

@jacobs - you're right, I wasn't looking at the Edit Budget screen 

Sorry @Taggart77

Appreciate your description, @jacobs as I've had more years with QWin, where if you categorize something under a title account, like Auto... it shows up in the Budget and in Reports as Auto:Other so the confusion here can't happen.