Exclude category from Budget reporting

suzivarnhagen

I have a current year budget set up in Quicken. There are some categories from prior years I am no longer using. I intentionally put a transaction in a category NOT in this years budget so it would not effect the budget reporting. Unfortunately, the budget reporting IS including the category that IS NOT in the budget. Is this working as expected? Shouldn't there be a way to record a transaction outside of the budget?

jacobs

If a category is not in your budget, it doesn't show up on the budget screen. (Just to make sure we';re describing the same thing: "not in the budget" means the category is not checked in Edit Budget > Select Categories; simply zeroing our budget values does not remove it from the budget.) It works correctly for me, and I'm not aware of any reported problem in this area.

Are you sure your category isn't a sub-category of another which is included? If not, if you're able to capture any screenshots which would show what you're seeing, if might help us better understand and offer suggestions.

suzivarnhagen

Jacob
Thanks for your response. I am positive the category is not in the budget yet the category is showing up in the budget B(W) report. I had a call with Support today and showed it to the agent. She wasn't sure if it's an error or working as designed.

It has to be a bug. I wonder if it's happening because a prior year budget included the category.

Any suggestions on what I should do?

jacobs

You should be able to add or remove a category at any time, so I can't image why being part of a prior year's budget would matter. 

Hmmm, one one to try to test this would be to make a copy of your data file, delete the prior year (and any other) budget, and see if anything changes in this test file.

Is the category a stand-alone main category? Does it show in the Edit Budget screen or just the main budget screen?

I don't understand how the agent didn't know if it was working right or not. 

If you're willing to take some screen shots, I'd be happy to poke at it further. Go to Edit Budget > Select Categories and take a screen shot of the category list around this category, then the Edit Budget screen around this category, and the main budget screen around this category. 

suzivarnhagen

Jacobs, I've tried to write you back but get a delivery error and I don't see how I can post screenshots here.

Chris_QPW

suzivarnhagen said:

Jacobs, I've tried to write you back but get a delivery error and I don't see how I can post screenshots here.

First off even though the message in the email suggests that you can reply and have it post a comment, that doesn't work.

Second on the including of a screenshot.  You have to earn enough points before the comment box will have an picture icon that can be used to attach a screenshot.  But you can still drag and drop an image file on to the comment box, and it will be attached to the comment.

suzivarnhagen

Here are a couple of screenshots.
The first shows the category showing in the budget report and the second is a snippet of the budget.

jacobs

Sorry, I'm still confused about what's showing in those screenshots, and which screen each is showing.

The first screenshot shows as subcategories:
  Dental
  Doctors/Services/Labs
  Medicine Drugs
  Vision Care

The second screenshot shows as subcategories:
  Doctors/Services/Labs
  Health Insurance - Suzi
  Medicine Drugs

Please clarify what each of these screens is a shot of. Is the first from the main budget screen or the edit budget screen?

The second you refer to as the Budget Report, but it's a report showing transactions. I've been assuming all along that when you refer to "budget report", you're talking about viewing or printing the main budget screen -- and this is not that. So what report are you showing here? If it's a transaction report, it's not tied to the budget at all. And the selection of which categories are included in a transaction report is separate than the selection of categories included in a budget. So please clarify what report you are describing and showing here, as I now think this gets to the heart of the issue.

suzivarnhagen

The first image, Budget Screen with Categories, is a screenshot of part of the Budget.
Dental, Doctors/Services/Labs, Medicine Drugs, Vision Care, are all subcategories under Medical.

The second image was taken by doing the following:
I looked at the 1-month Budget (Feb 2021). I saw that Medical was over by a lot. I clicked on the bar and it opened below the bar, the 12 month budget history. I clicked on the bar for Feb 2021, Medical, and it opened into what is called "Budget Details for Feb, 2021"

Now, what I find interesting, is that at the top, right of the Budget Details for Feb, 2021, it says: 6 accounts, 9 categories. That is leading me to believe that it is picking up categories it shouldn't. That's what is happening. In total I have 1 category and 8 subcategories for medical but I am only using 1 category and four subcategories this year. I think this is a bug.

jacobs

Aha! You never mentioned anything about the 1-month budget screen before. A little history: the 1-month budget is a feature that was in the original 2010-era Quicken Essentials which provided the code base for the modern Quicken Mac. The full annual budget was added much later, and the ability to limit the annual budget by account was just added in the past year. It wouldn't surprise me that they didn't go back to do extensive re-writing of the old code because they probably need to re-write the 1-month budget code at some point to modernize it.

Sorry, I never use this part of the program; I didn't even know you could click on a line in the 1-month budget, get a 12-month history, and then convert that into a report for a specific month!

I confirm that drilling down in this way, I can get the results you're reporting -- if I click on the main category. If I click on the subcategory, I get only that sub-category. I'm not sure if it's by design that it shows all the subcategories of the main category for the given month or if it's a bug, but it's been this way since budgets were added to Quicken Mac.

I'd also note that you can accomplish the same thing without going to the 1-month budget view. In the 12-month budget, click on the cell for the category and month you want to drill down to. Then click on the "View [month] Transactions" button. Here again, the report will default to the main category and all its subcategories if you click on the main category, and just the sub-category if you click on the sub-category.