Quicken Budget: Set amount does not stick? (Q Mac)

ravisumifire

I am new to Quicken budgeting. I have a basic budget for the year 2021 where I've selected multiple categories and for each major category, in the Edit Budget screen I pick the monthly maximum/budgeted amount I want for that category. I noticed that even when (while editing the budget) I set a FIXED monthly amount as the budgeted amount for a given month (for eg: $1150 for Food & Groceries), I noticed that it automatically changes this budgeted amount to arbitrarily larger numbers for some months and throws off my budgeting. Even if I set the January value to $1150 and choose the [Cmd =] shortcut to copy it to all months, some months get changed to arbitrarily different numbers. This is frustrating and I see no way to change this behavior. See image here: https://imgur.com/a/ai5V6mF

Can someone help?

jacobs

It looks like you have sub-categories for the Food & Dining category. If the sum of the sub-categories is larger than the budget number for the main category, Quicken inserts the sum of the sub-categories. That is, if you're putting in a value of $1,150 for the main category, and the sub-categories total $800, Quicken keeps $1,150 for the main category. But if the sub-categories total $1,400, Quicken will enter that value in the main category. You can't have sub-categories of groceries for $700 and dining for $700 yet have the total Food & Dining budget for the month be $1,150.

jacobs

It looks like you have sub-categories for the Food & Dining category. If the sum of the sub-categories is larger than the budget number for the main category, Quicken inserts the sum of the sub-categories. That is, if you're putting in a value of $1,150 for the main category, and the sub-categories total $800, Quicken keeps $1,150 for the main category. But if the sub-categories total $1,400, Quicken will enter that value in the main category. You can't have sub-categories of groceries for $700 and dining for $700 yet have the total Food & Dining budget for the month be $1,150.

ravisumifire

This seems to have fixed my issue - I hadn't picked values for the sub-categories that I'd included. Once I removed the sub-categories to budget at just the top level this problem went away. Thank you!