Is there a way to add running totals to budget reports (Jan - Dec)? (Q Mac)

rg_carroll

Is there a way to add running totals to budget reports (Jan - Dec)?

jacobs

When you say running totals, do you mean a year-to-date total? (Running totals are for lists of transactions, like in your checking account register, to show the balance after each transaction. Since the budget doesn't show individual transactions, I'm guessing you're wanting a year-to-date total.

If so, there's good news (somewhat) and bad news, and good news.

The kinda good news is that 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 31, so the YTD actual versus budget will give me actual income/spending through today and budget income/spending through August. On the last day of the month, assuming all your income and expenses for the month have been entered, then you have what you want. But if you try doing this tomorrow (September 1), it would be useless, because it would be comparing actual income/expenses through September 1 against budget through September 30. What you'd want, of course, is actual versus budget through the end of the previous month, January through August. 

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. It's annoying to have to build each time, bit if you're pretty facile with spreadsheets, you'll find after you've done it one or two times that it doesn't take too long. 

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. 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 final good news is that the status of this feature request has been marked as "Planned." That means the developers have agreed that this is a desirable feature and have it on their development roadmap for implementation. Oh, but the bad news about that: we never know when various features are planned for release; it could be next month or it could be 18 months. 

rg_carroll

Jacob - Thanks for your thorough answer - you captured the issue exactly! Hopefully this gets addressed by Quicken in the near future.