Budget Separation Fixed Vs Variable (Q Mac)

Cliff Meyer

I would like to be able to view my budget divided into 2 parts: Fixed Vs Adjustable, I have fixed income - like Social Security, Bond Interest, I have variable income like stock sales, like wise I fixed expenses like Mortgage, Car Payments, Insurance, I have variable expenses like, vacation costs, Entertainment costs, Donations. It looking at my budget it would be great if I could see the variable income / expenses aggregated together because they are the only thing I can adjust to make my budget.

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

sdackin

Having this option affords me the opportunity to better manage, adjust budget vs actual a in real time. This would be important as it makes quicken an invaluable tool for financial management.

jacobs

Adding such a feature would require Quicken to have a field for each Category for users to designate every category as either "variable" or "fixed" income/expense. They couldn't impose a universal standard for several reasons. First, many people have created some, or many, categories of their own, and Quicken wouldn't know how to treat those. Second, even for default Quicken categories, something which is fixed for one user (salary, cable bill) might be variable for another — so users would need to go through and set every category as fixed or variable. I don't envision them doing that, because most users wouldn't do it, or wouldn't do it correctly/completely to make such a budget feature work.

Wouldn't it work for you to create a budget for just your variable categories. It could be your only budget, or a second budget to your full (all categories) budget. This would essentially give you your variable income and expenses aggregated together, as you're looking for, without any changes to the program?

bevans2

I would very much use this budgeting feature. Maybe I'll try to vote again, but honestly I don't mess with looking or voting anymore related to budgeting functionality as nothing is ever released in the product.

Jacobs, help me understand your option to create two separate budgets - one for normal budgeting and one for variable expenses. Like Cliff's comment above, my spending is such that many categories can have variable and normal items. So what I have done is to create 2 categories for the two budgets (ie auto:repairs and auto:repairs variable). Is there a more efficient way to do what you recommend, especially since budgeting using tags is not available either?

jacobs

I was just suggesting the option of having two budgets: total budget (so you get to a bottom line) and variable budget (so you just zero in on the specific categories you consider variable/discretionary). Create the total budget first, then create the variable subset by deleting the “fixed” categories.

mm69iimm

Just add a new field in the Category List, similar to the "Type" column, to assign a fix or var budget income/expense.

JimKeleher

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20402476#Comment_20402476

Yes! All we need is another field for each category (required/system category and user-defined category) that allows the user to assign it to a category group. I used category groups (Essential, Non-essential, House, Savings, Retirement, Education, …) in QWin for years. It gives you a big picture view of where the money is going and then you can track/manage the details at the category level. It seems like such a simple feature to implement. Please make this available in QMac.

Chris_QPW

I will throw out how Quicken Windows handles this, category groups.

Having a field in each category doesn't seem like the right approach. You need to have an "upper level grouping" not something that is buried in each category. And as you will see this isn't a "add one field" kind of request, that would be useless, you need this information used to display in the proper format.

Category groups show up in Quicken Windows some reports (sections/and filtering) and in the budget.

You put each category in a given category group.

Report filtering:

Chris_QPW

It seems like such a simple feature to implement. Please make this available in QMac.

Came back looking at this because there is another thread essentially asking for category groups, which would be required for this Idea to be implemented. In truth both of these are probably the same Idea when taken in the larger context.

But unlike the statement made above I don't think this is a "simple feature", and it occurred to me that Quicken Mac history might make it even more complicated. Quicken Windows had category groups long before they rewrote the budget system in Quicken Windows 2012. So, it was "natural" that the top sections of the budget would be the category groups. Quicken Mac on the other hand already has a budget system where that isn't true.

So, you two different things going on, there is the changing of the code, and then there is "will the current users complain if you change over to the top sections being the category groups?" My guess is that if they just change to what Quicken Windows does people will complain about the different organization, and demand it be an option.

Sounds easy to the user, just give it as an option. But what that means to the developers is maintaining two different ways of doing it.

Here is the other Idea thread for reference:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7896015/fixed-and-discretionary-expenses-q-mac-budgets