Performance to Budget

Richard Marquardt

My current version of Quicken (6.8.3) does not allow me to generate a performance-to -budget report for any period other than one month at a time. So, if I want to know how I'm doing for the first 6 months of 2022, for example, I cannot generate such a report. Even the 12-month report does not give totals of actual vs budgeted amounts for the year. Or is there a way?

jacobs

Yes and no. You can view actual-versus-budget year-to-date in the current budget section. But… you'll find it's probably not good enough. 

Let's start with how you can view actual spending versus your budget on the main budget screen, in case you're not aware of this. 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 29, so the YTD actual versus budget will give me actual income/spending through today and budget income/spending through July. That's pretty close to a full month, so it might be okay, but if I was doing this on Monday (August 1), it would be useless, because it would be comparing actual income/expenses through August 1 against budget through August 31. What I'd want, of course, is actual versus budget through the end of the previous month, January through July. Or if I was doing this today, I might want 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. 

So if the on-screen budget versus actual column, isn't useful enough for you, 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, 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 or July. 


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. The good news for us is that the status of this feature request has been changed from "Submitted to Review" to "Planned." That means the developers have agreed that this is a desirable feature and have it on their development roadmap for implementation. The bad news: we never know when various features are planned for release; it could be next month or it could be 18 months. 

Richard Marquardt

Thank you very much for this, jacobs. I appreciate having at least this much capacity to examine my performance to budget. It's also good to know that Quicken is planning to develop the capacity to do a performance to budget to any dates selected.

DMSilverfox

I just ran into this problem and went searching for answers ... and since this question and answer were generated yesterday, it came out on top. Thank you for asking, Richard, and thank you Jacobs for such a complete and thorough answer.

Is there a way for users to signal the developers that this is a high priority for us?

jacobs

DMSilverfox said:

Is there a way for users to signal the developers that this is a high priority for us?

Typically, this is what the "Idea" posts are for. People are encouraged to vote for the features they want, and higher vote totals lead to more attention from the developers. Many other factors affect what gets done when, such as the amount of time a particular issue will take, which software engineers and designers are needed to do the work, whether a feature affects other areas of the program, whether there are multiple ideas in one area of the program which the developers plan to address at the same time with new coding, changes in external factors such as banking security protocols which might require diverting development time, etc.

But once an Idea has been marked as "Planned", the voting feature on this site is disabled, because a "Planned" idea has already been assigned a time slot on the development roadmap. In other words, no, once an Idea is "Planned", we users don't have a way of influencing when it will be worked on, because the development team has evaluated all the factors above and decided when they will work on it. 

Big-E

With each irrelevant update I receive, I hold out hope that this fix will be included. Still waiting.