Format of budget reports.

Art Kelly

I'm treasurer for a non profit, using Quicken for accounting and reports. I want to present data reflecting activity through January 2021, displayed against annual budget. However when I pull up the report it is displaying ytd information (i.e. January and accumulated February.) How can I restrict this to just January data?

jacobs

You can't. It's a major flaw in Quicken Mac's budget report not to allow user to specify an "as of" date. There's an Idea thread about this topic, and you should take a minute to go there and add your vote for this feature. (Click the link, and in the large blue box under the top post, click the little gray arrow under the vote counter; your vote will register and the arrow will change to solid black to indicate you voted.)

So what can you do in the meantime? The answer is to Export your budget instead of printing it. Open the .csv file in Numbers or Excel. The export has Actual, Budget and Difference columns for each month. Delete all the columns which aren't relevant, sum the remaining ones which are, and clean up the formatting as much or little as you care to in order to have a presentable report. You can sum the YTD month actuals through the prior month, and compare to the same months of the budget, or the full year budget, whichever suits your needs better.

It's annoying not to be able to do this within Quicken; however, with just a couple minutes of work in a spreadsheet, you can get what you need.

Art Kelly

Thanks for the help. Exporting as CSV and reformatting gives me what I need but a laborious job.
I added my input to idea thread. That capability is a fundamental function of any accounting program. It's got to be fixed.