Budgeting in Quicken Mac

Dan R NC

I'm new to Quicken Mac and I've been looking at the budgeting tool in Quicken. During my working years, I've never created a budget. When I retired, I decided it might be a good idea to come up with a budget (ya think?). For the past years, I have been using Excel to do my budgeting, using data I extract from Quicken Windows. Since converting over to Q Mac this week, I thought I'd see what the Budgeting tool in Quicken was all about.

I've read through the information in the Quicken for Mac Help section and have a few simple questions that I couldn't find an answer for (though I may have a guess). Hopefully someone can provide answers or just point me to the web page I may have missed.

1. After I select the Accounts and Categories I want to be used, how exactly does Quicken come up with the budget? Does it just use last year's data or is there some inflation/escalation applied, like maybe using a trend from previous years?

2. If there is no inflation, is there a way to direct Quicken to use some sort of inflation or escalation rate (by Category would be preferable)? I did not see anything about applying an inflation rate, so I'm guess there isn't one.

3. I don't really need a budget at the sub-category level and I must be confused about this sentence in the Budgeting Help section:

"When you add a top-level category to your budget, it will include transaction activity for all transactions in that category grouping even if you do not explicitly select the subcategories for inclusion in your Budget."

I tried this. I selected the top-level categories I wanted and said "Go" and Quicken came up with a budget that was about $36,000 less than what I got when the top-level and sub-level categories I wanted were selected. (They were all just Expense categories.)

Does this not work any more? I know I can just roll up the sub-categories when viewing the budget and that's not a problem. I am just curious what it is I don't understand about that sentence.

4. The Quickfill options look interesting, but it would be nice if I could provide the year total number and have Quicken ratio out the new number using the monthly pattern that it came up with in the initial budget it developed. Is there any way to do that?

Thanks in advance for any answers and help provided.

jacobs

1 & 2. Quicken Mac's budget does not have any inflation calculation calculator. It will use last year's actual values, an d you can increase them as you see fit. You can take the prior year's actual, increase it as you wish, and tell the budget to spit it evenly over 12 months; you can't tell it to increase each month's value by an inflation-adjusted amount. 

3. You can budget at the main category level or at the sub-category level as you wish. It can get confusing if you try to do both within the same category, but it works.  

4. You can have Quicken divide an annual total monthly, quarterly, or  by any of the options which show up — but there isn't an option to take a new annual value and divide it proportionally relative toast year's values.