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Include scheduled transaction amount when viewing "Entire Budget Year" Budget (Q Mac)

jshaf

Currently, the scheduled transactions are not totaled in the future months of the budget. So, the amount +/ - on the left only takes into account YTD and so it is difficult to know how much each category truly has remaining without considering the scheduled transactions. Quicken for windows has this.

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Budgets

Quicken Mac

Reviewed

Status: Reviewed

Comments

jshaf

Not entirely. The budget only shows totals for transactions that are posted in the register. I have my recurring bills and income programmed into the scheduled transactions. But, when I look at the budget it only shows those that are posted. So, for instance. The scheduled transactions for Oct-Dec do now show in the budget screen for actual vs budgeted. The result is that is does NOT show how much money I have left to spend because it shows the total budgeted for the future months rather than subtracted the scheduled transactions. I hope that makes sense?? The bottom line is that it does not show the amount left to spend in a budget reflecting the future scheduled transactions.

jacobs

MoMoney99 said:

I was considering subscribing to Quicken For Mac, but if I'm understanding this correctly, you're saying that scheduled transactions do not show up in the Budget as a deduction or cash outflow at all? Meaning, you'll have to re-enter all those scheduled amounts manually on the budget screen? That's insane! This should be a no brainer feature.

To add to what @jshaf wrote above, I just wanted to clarify that you don't need to "re-enter all those scheduled amounts manually on the budget screen" unless you want future scheduled transactions to show up in the Actual columns of your budget. Since you technically haven't incurred the expenses or made the income deposits in scheduled transactions yet, they aren't showing in a future month as actual income or expense. But as you get to that month, and you click the Paid/Deposited button to post the scheduled transactions, they will then be part of your actual income or expenses in the budget.

On the other hand, if what you're expecting is for Quicken to incorporate scheduled transactions into your Budget values, then no, that doesn't happen. And think about why. When you set up a budget for a year, it's based on your prior year actuals as well as whatever changes you make in your expected income and expenses. Quicken can't somehow incorporate scheduled transactions into the budget values, because the budget values are already based on last year's actual or the values you entered; it has no way of knowing that in some cases, you perhaps entered a budget of zero and want Quicken to incorporate your scheduled transactions for that category into the budget. Or that you want to replace last year's actual as the value in your budget and replace it with the value from your scheduled transactions.

jshaf

@Jacobs The windows version does this and it provides great insight to see if you are over spent or underspent. Here is how I look at my budget. My scheduled transactions I have to pay but outside of that its discretionary. If I over spend then I may not have what is needed to pay the scheduled later in the year. Again, windows does this and updates the remaining amount left based on what has been spent and what is scheduled to spend. Its a simple formula, quicken for windows does it and probably the feature I use the most. If its not moved to the Mac version I will most likely switch back to the windows version.

Chris_QPW

@jacobs said:

And think about why. When you set up a budget for a year, it's based on your prior year actuals as well as whatever changes you make in your expected income and expenses. Quicken can't somehow incorporate scheduled transactions into the budget values, because the budget values are already based on last year's actual or the values you entered

I think you are misunderstanding the request. It isn't the budget numbers that are changed, they stay the same. It is the future actual values that are changed.

Example (property tax) first with reminders not included:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031128/uploads/editor/qx/jz7704sd889u.png

Now with reminders included:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031128/uploads/editor/hg/gvc6cu8nkbyo.png

This of course also affects the balance column. Note that for future months this is quite easy, but it tends to be harder (programming wise) for the current month which is a mix of "real actuals" and "reminder actuals".

Balance without reminders:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031128/uploads/editor/5m/tt8u5x2ut9bd.png

Balance with reminders (actuals match budget):

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031128/uploads/editor/d4/530wxxuszbhw.png

BTW the reports in Quicken Windows don't support including the reminders, so there is that gap even in Quicken Windows. Only the budget "views" support this.

jshaf

@Chris_QPW great visual explanation. But, I'm not sure if your agreeing the windows version does this or not? I do recall using this in windows version up until I switch last year to the Mac version. The windows budget "future" would show the scheduled values and it did +/- in the current month as well.

Chris_QPW

jshaf said:

@Chris_QPW great visual explanation. But, I'm not sure if your agreeing the windows version does this or not? I do recall using this in windows version up until I switch last year to the Mac version. The windows budget "future" would show the scheduled values and it did +/- in the current month as well.

Yes the Windows version does it, those screenshots are "real". As for the current month I was just pointing out it is a bit harder to program, but the Windows version does do it (not shown in the screenshots though).

But the budget reports don't include reminders, only the budget views (Graph and Annual) do.

EDIT I consider it a bug that the budget views and reports aren't consistent in Quicken Windows, the reports should be changed to allow including the reminders.

jacobs

Chris_QPW said:

I think you are misunderstanding the request. It isn't the budget numbers that are changed, they stay the same. It is the future actual values that are changed.

Thanks, @Chris_QPW for showing examples from Quicken windows. (Always appreciated by us Mac-only users). But I did understand the request. Or rather, I was responding to the post by @MoMoney99, not the original post by @jshaf at the top of the thread. It wasn't clear to me that @MoMoney99 was talking about Actuals or Budget values, and was saying they'd need to re-enter all their scheduled transactions. That's why I asked whether the question was about including scheduled transactions in Budget or Actual values. For Actuals, I wrote that it wouldn't be necessary to re-enter on the budget screen, because the Actuals would update once the scheduled transactions were posted. I'm sorry if my reply on that wasn't clear or confused the issue.

Bottom line: as we've established in this thread, Quicken Mac does not include scheduled transactions in Actuals; they only show up once the scheduled transactions are posted. Quicken Windows has an option to include scheduled transactions in Actuals or not.

Since this is an Idea thread @jshaf created, the best way to get such an option in Quicken Mac would be for users interested in this functionality to add their vote at the top of this thread. I'd note that it has so far received only two votes over the past four months, so it's not something that will be pushed to the development team unless it garners more votes. (Of course, it may already be on the developers' roadmap, as there are a number of enhancement requests related to budgets which they haven't yet tackled and will likely be tackled together.)

Chris_QPW

@jacobs, sorry, I misunderstood your statement.

Chris_QPW

MoMoney99 said:

Lastly, on an unrelated note, I cannot believe there is no support for AMEX direct sync without having to manually import the QFX file. All the other solutions I've tried support automatic importing of transactions. I'm in Canada - please tell me there is a way of doing this as the Amex Platinum card is the one I use most often.

Quicken has much more limited support for financial institutions in Canada than it does in the US. For instance I don't think there is a "pure Canadian" financial institution that supports Direct Connect, only Express Web Connect and Web Connect. American Express Canada is one that only supports Web Connect (the importing of a QFX file).

jshaf

Thank you all for the comments and voting for this. If you haven't voted to move this up please do so.

KillDash9

It is interesting to see the different view points here. I would expect my scheduled bills and income to pre-populate as "budgeted" amounts for each category. E.g., if I have a reoccurring transaction to pay rent/mortgage.. then that value would be my monthly "budget" for rent/mortgage. By creating a reoccurring transaction - I have obviously "budgeted" for a specific amount each month. Same with other scheduled bills. They should all show up in the "budgeted" column, but with the ability to tweak. E.g., "electricity" will change month-to-month - so I should be able to override the value that was pre-populated from my bills. Same with income. Pre-populate with scheduled income - and allow overrides. I might be expecting a raise mid-year, which will increate the taxes I pay. I'd like to be able to budget for that. y updating the amounts for specific months. Or maybe after my raise.... I can pay a little extra principle off the car loan.. I'd like to budget that in. So for me.. it makes more sense to enter the scheduled bills and income as "budgeted".

jshaf

I can’t believe more people don’t want this

Quicken Anja

Hello All,

The Community Support team regularly reviews long-standing posts and Ideas for relevancy and current interest. This Idea seems to have stalled and we would like to gauge the current interest in this request.

If you would like to see this idea implemented, please add your vote and a comment explaining how this idea would be beneficial for you. More information, including steps to vote and how to submit your own Ideas for future product features/improvements, is also available here.

Thank you,

Quicken Community Support Team

sulriksen

I want to see scheduled bills show up as spent money (actuals) in my budget.

jacobs

Just adding two notes to this feature request:

(1) It is a feature which already exists in Quicken Windows. It is explained in this post in a Quicken Windows discussion:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20088974#Comment_20088974

(2) There was a previous Idea thread for this feature which apparently did not receive enough user votes for consideration and was archived. Users who want to see this functionality need to add their votes to this topic meets the threshold for the developers to consider it.

jshaf

Oh my Gosh, how long does this take when the windows version has had it for more than a decade???

jacobs

@jshaf said: Oh my Gosh, how long does this take when the windows version has had it for more than a decade???

There are hundreds of feature requests, and the small Mac development team can only implement a few things at a time — so the answer is that it can take a long time! 😉 The reason for these Idea threads is to allow users to vote for the features they would find desirable, and to feed those votes to the developers to guide their prioritization of feature requests.

In this case, after three-and-a-half years, this thread has attracted only 18 votes. Other features have many times that number; some have multiple hundreds of votes. So other requests with many more votes are more likely to be implemented before this one. This thread needs at least 30 votes for it to be forwarded to the developers for their assessment for implementation.

That said, there are a number of budget features which have a lot of votes and are marked as "Planned" by the developers. None have been implemented yet, suggesting that they will, at some unknown time, do a major re-write of the budget part of the program in order to add the features they have indicated are "Planned" — and when they do that, they may pick up other budget functionality requests to incorporate into the scope of that project. (But it would help if this thread reached 30 votes.)

jshaf

Jacobs, I get it, but the votes are worthless and don't mean anything. It's. been in windows for a decade. Its code. The Romans built the coliseum in 7-8 years

Chris_QPW

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20453871#Comment_20453871

How long a feature has been in Quicken Windows is irrelevant to Quicken Mac. Quicken Mac was totally rewritten and so it is getting features as the Quicken Mac team has time, with the priority of what they feel is needed first (and they might even determine that a feature you want isn't something they feel Quicken Mac should have. By design, Quicken Mac isn't a clone of Quicken Windows).

EDIT: BTW not being a clone of Quicken Windows can be a good thing. Quicken Windows is far from perfect and in some cases Quicken Mac has implemented things better than Quicken Windows.

jshaf

the only updates I see coming from this Mac team is more ways to track investments and dashboards that I don't use. I have used one feature they updated the Mac app with to date (4+ years).

jacobs

the votes are worthless and don't mean anything.

I'll disagree. Many of the features which have been implemented over the past few years are things users asked for and voted for. Just because the one feature you are waiting for hasn't been implemented does not mean "the votes are worthless and don't mean anything."

The Romans built the coliseum in 7-8 years

And how many thousands of slaves did they use to accomplish this? Compare and contrast to a small team of fewer than a dozen Quicken Mac programmers. 🤣

the only updates I see coming from this Mac team is more ways to track investments and dashboards that I don't use.

It's unfortunate that among all the features added over 4 years, you only found a single one which was useful. I've found many. And I also have a long list of features I strongly want to see, and continue waiting for.

Again, I'd note that this feature request has only received 18 votes over 3+ years. It clearly isn't something a lot of users are clamoring for. But hopefully it will get included anyway when they do the major re-write of the budget portion of the program.

jshaf

Jacobs, it's amusing how you manage to sprinkle your "input" across every corner of the forum, but let's be honest—this endless back-and-forth is about as effective as hoping the Quicken for Mac team will actually release a meaningful update. You’ve even admitted on another post with over 100 votes—one that aligns with my request (which, by the way, only has a meager 18 votes)—that the system is flawed. The real issue here is that the voting system makes it look like each request has minimal support when, in reality, they’d pack more punch if combined.

But, hey, don't feel the need to respond. You can just move on to the next user asking for some long-lost feature from an ancient Mac or Windows version and remind them how unimportant their requests must be.

jacobs

Just to be clear, I wasn’t saying your request is unimportant; I was only noting that it hadn’t garnered enough votes yet to be sent to the developers for their consideration. I’m sorry you find that “amusing”; I was only trying to offer information which might offer insight into how the process works.

Quicken Janean

Hi All, We have a survey that is being conducted regarding budgeting in Quicken Classic for Mac. Although we do review your ideas, feel free to share your suggestions there as well.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RFWHHKF

Thanks!