Does Quicken for Mac support reporting of actuals vs budget like Quicken for Windows does?

Random Brothers

I used Quicken for years and loved the ability to see my YTD spend vs my budget as well as forecast through the end of the year based on actuals to date. Quicken for Mac did not have this reporting/view when I last checked. Has Quicken finally added this critical functionality to its Mac version? If so I will buy it today.

jacobs

Well, yes and no. The budget in Quicken can print a YTD versus actual; this has existed since the 12-month budgets were added to Quicken Mac several years ago.

The problem is that YTD is not a user-customizable date; it is always today. As a result, if you do a YTD versus actual report today, April 16, you will be getting YTD through April budget values, while your actual values will only reflect the partial month of April. What most people would want is to be able to get a YTD report through the end of the previous month, so you're comparing full-month budget and actual numbers (rather than full-month budget versus partial month actual). Hope springs eternal that the developers will provide a fix for this one day!

In the meantime, if you wanted to get a meaningful YTD report through March 31, you would export the budget, open the exported file in a spreadsheet, and you could quickly delete the columns part March and create a YTD actual and YTD Budget column. It's annoying to have to do this externally, but if you've done it once or twice, you will find you can do it quite quickly thereafter. (I don't do this regularly, but just did one as a test; it took me about a minute to delete the unneeded months and create two YTD columns.) And hopefully the developers will add a custom data range, or "as of" date for budget reports to make this unnecessary in the future.

jacobs

Well, yes and no. The budget in Quicken can print a YTD versus actual; this has existed since the 12-month budgets were added to Quicken Mac several years ago.

The problem is that YTD is not a user-customizable date; it is always today. As a result, if you do a YTD versus actual report today, April 16, you will be getting YTD through April budget values, while your actual values will only reflect the partial month of April. What most people would want is to be able to get a YTD report through the end of the previous month, so you're comparing full-month budget and actual numbers (rather than full-month budget versus partial month actual). Hope springs eternal that the developers will provide a fix for this one day!

In the meantime, if you wanted to get a meaningful YTD report through March 31, you would export the budget, open the exported file in a spreadsheet, and you could quickly delete the columns part March and create a YTD actual and YTD Budget column. It's annoying to have to do this externally, but if you've done it once or twice, you will find you can do it quite quickly thereafter. (I don't do this regularly, but just did one as a test; it took me about a minute to delete the unneeded months and create two YTD columns.) And hopefully the developers will add a custom data range, or "as of" date for budget reports to make this unnecessary in the future.

Random Brothers

Thanks!