How do I budget quarterly? (Q Mac)

JenFromBrooklyn

Hi! I switched from Mint to Quicken because I need to budget quarterly, and the sales rep I talked to before purchasing told me I could do this. I just bought the product and I can see how to set up my budget monthly and I can see how to set it up yearly, but I can't see how to set it up quarterly. I bought the product specifically to be able to do it this way.

I often don't know in advance what month an expense or paycheck is going to fall into, so using a monthly model means I'm constantly going back into the budget to edit it, which takes waaaaaaaay too much time. But I do know what quarters expenses and income will fall into. That's why I want to budget this way. I need to be able to compare budget vs. income and expense.

Can anyone help me set up my budget this way?

jacobs

There is no specific quarterly budgeting in Quicken. There are two ways you could accomplish what you want, though...

Enter your quarterly budget values in the first of last month of each quarter, and only look at the year-to-date actual-versus budget results near the end of each quarter. In fact, when you enter a value in the Edit budget screen, the drop-down menu has an options for doing exactly this:

Or enter your budget values split evenly over each month of a quarter or year, and again, just look at your results quarterly. 

Quicken Mac currently has the glaring absence of being able to generate a report with a user-specified time period, so if you're interested in actual-versus-budget for anything other than year-to-date, you currently have to export the budget to a spreadsheet. It's not ideal, but also not too difficult for something you look at quarterly. Export the budget, delete the columns for all the months except the quarter you want, create sum columns for the 3 months of budget and 3 months of actual, copy those formulas down through all the rows, and you have a report of actual-versus-budget for the quarter.

(Many, many Quicken Mac users hope the developers will soon add the ability to specify a time range for budget reports.)

JenFromBrooklyn

Thank you for that incredibly helpful response! I guess this is unusual, but I need to track my budget v. actual with regard to my quarterly budget weekly. I've tried a lot of different ways and this is the best way for the particular arrangement of my finances.

I can't distribute the quarterly budget evenly by month, that just makes the results meaningless - I have a lot of expenses that I don't know where they will land in a quarter, they just come in when they come in. So if I divide those expenses by three, when they come in all at once (which I know they're going to do) I'm over budget here and under budget there and none of it is accurate so it makes the report useless.

The export plan doesn't work if I need to do it every week.

I can try putting the expenses in at the beginning of the quarter instead of the end (which I'm doing right now, and which is producing nonsense) and see if that helps. Then I just need to go in every month and carry forward whatever is left. It's more labor than I honestly want to do for software I paid for. So I'm writing this all out in the hopes that someone in charge of prioritizing that feature sees it :).

jacobs

Hmmm, okay forget what Quicken can and can't do for a second…I don't understand how you could ever have a quarterly budget and compare actual versus budget weekly.

The point of budget versus actual is to understand whether you're on target or over or under budget. For instance, let's say you budget $300 per quarter for auto repairs. That would make sense; you don't know exactly when you might take the car in for service. So in your ideal world, how would you compare that quarterly budget with actual week by week? That is, we're now three weeks into January. Perhaps you've had no auto repair expense yet, so that's $0 out of $300. Or perhaps you had the car in last week and spent $325. That's $295 out of $300. How would either of those results help you evaluate your budget?

I just don't understand how looking at a quarterly budget after one week can tell you anything useful. Another example: if you budget $1,300 for the quarter for groceries, and you have spent $200 after two weeks, what are you doing with that information? Well, it tells you that you have $1,100 left for the rest of the quarter, right? Is that good or bad? You could count weeks and say there are 11 weeks left in the quarter, so you can spend on average $100 per week to be on budget -- but essentially that's budgeting by week, not quarter. 

JenFromBrooklyn said:

I can't distribute the quarterly budget evenly by month, that just makes the results meaningless - I have a lot of expenses that I don't know where they will land in a quarter, they just come in when they come in. So if I divide those expenses by three, when they come in all at once (which I know they're going to do) I'm over budget here and under budget there and none of it is accurate so it makes the report useless.

So if dividing the quarterly budget by three months won't work, what would? If you assign the entire quarterly budget to the first month, or the last month, you're saying that wouldn't work? I don't understand how you have one number for a quarter but evaluate it weekly. If you can explain how you're trying to use a budget, perhaps we can figure out a way to do it between Quicken and a spreadsheet.