Budget/Category Comparison

colarson

I would like to see a report that compares year-to-date expenditures as compared to budget by category

DTJ41

OK so what is the answer for providing this report.

Chris_QPW

DTJ41 said:

OK so what is the answer for providing this report.

This is an "Idea" post.  As in Quicken Inc is looking for how many people are interested in it by the number of people that have voted for it.  As of now, only the original person posting the idea has voted for it.

If no one votes for it, it isn't likely that Quicken Inc will ever implement it.

jacobs

@colarson  @DTJ41  First, you can do this… somewhat… currently, although there are significant limitations about how useful it is.

You can view actual spending versus your budget on the main budget screen. To the right of the category column should be two gray columns showing totals. If you aren't seeing these — e.g. if your second column is January — then click the "<<" icon at the top of the category column to make these totals columns visible. Next, the totals columns can be toggled between showing YTD actual versus YTD budget and showing actual YTD versus full year budget; click the little "v" icon in the column heading to switch between the two.

Now for the limitations. If you Print the budget, you can either Print Full Budget or Print Summary Budget. The Full version prints month by month actual, budget and difference — but strangely, no totals. The Summary version prints the totals — either YTD or full year, depending on the setting above. 

The bigger problem is that YTD is always through the current day — which is not what you'd want 99% of the time. I'm typing this on July 4, so the YTD actual versus budget will give me actual income/spending through today and budget income/spending through July. That's useless to me, since July has just started. What I'd want is actual versus budget through the end of the previous month, January through June. In my opinion, this is one of the top flaws in Quicken Mac, and I keep hoping the developers will get around to addressing this in the near future. 

The work-around, if you are so inclined, is to export the Full Budget to a CSV file, open it in Excel or Numbers or Google Sheets, delete the months you don't want (in my example, delete July through December), create a column to sum the actual values for the remaining months and a column to sum the budget values for each month, and copy those formulas down all the rows. In that way, you can have a actual versus budget report for January through June. 


That all said, this is one of the most-requested features for Quicken Mac; there is an existing Idea thread discussing the need for this feature. If you're reading this and wanting this feature, I suggest you take a few seconds to go to that thread and add your vote for it.