Transaction Report - selected categories current amount compared to budgeted amount

Pat M

I would like to find or create a report that compares the current amount of selected categories to those categories budgeted amount, for the current month.

jacobs

The budget section of Quicken isn't part of Reports. Maybe someday; until then…

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 August 27, so the YTD actual versus budget will give me actual income/spending through today and budget income/spending through August. That's pretty close to a full month, so it might be okay, but if I was doing this next Thursday (September 1), it would be useless, because it would be comparing actual income/expenses through September 1 against budget through September 30. What I'd want, of course, is actual versus budget through the end of the previous month, January through August. Or if I was doing this today, I might want January through July. 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 this 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 July or August. 


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.