Paycheck errors on budget and budget reports

droopydog53

Hello Quicken Community,

This is an attempt to reopen a previous discussion that was closed with out any answers. The previous one was while I was using Quicken 2017. I have since upgraded to the subscription version and the problems still exist....

I have seen a number of posts regarding paychecks not showing up correctly. I have a similar problem but have not been able to find a solution. So here goes....
I have entered both my wife's and my paycheck using the paycheck wizard. We have the gross income which is assigned to the parent category "Salary") plus a few Pre-Tax, Tax, After-Tax deductions and they all have appropriate categories that they are assigned to. Both of our paychecks are set up this way.

Problem #1: In the annual view of the budget, my paycheck total that is displayed under the paycheck category is the total of my net pay and fed tax. None of the other deductions show up here. Just the fed tax. It is as if the Fed tax is not subtracted from the paycheck. My wife's check is set up the same way and her paycheck shows up correctly in the budget - only the net income. Why the difference?

Problem #2: Paycheck disappearing from the current budget report. With the annual budget window open, I select the current budget report from the reports tab in the upper right. My paycheck shows up correctly in the initial report. As soon as I go to customize the report (gear wheel), deselect a category, and click "OK," all of the paychecks disappear from the report. The categories that I deselected were not connected to my paycheck. If I go back and re-select those categories, the report does not go back to its original display.

I deleted and reinstalled my paycheck but that did not change anything with the problems listed above. Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

Mitchell Mackler

I have been having related problems with paychecks not appearing in budgets regardless of whether the paycheck itself is selected for within the selected budgeted categories or not. I therefore went into the paycheck transaction and split the salary into $1 in a new temporary salary category and the rest of the gross salary was left in "Salary" as always. That worked to have both "Salary" and the new category picked up by the budget. Even when I reversed and moved all salary under "Salary": and deleted the temporary category, it still picked it up. I don't quite grasp the significance of how the fix points to the underlying problem, but there you are.

UKR

In your Category List, do you have the parent category "Salary" followed by subcategories

• Gross Salary, self      with tax line item "W-2:Salaray or wages, self" and
• Gross Salary, spouse with tax line item "W-2:Salaray or wages, spouse"

IMHO, it's never a good idea to record transactions into a parent category when there also are subcategories. In Budget views and reports you may end up with items being recorded to the parent showing up in a pseudo (not really existing) subcategory "Parent:Other".

droopydog53

UKR, Thank you. You actually answered one of my follow up questions about the proper way to use categories. I agree and have made those adjustments, however it did not fix either of the problems.

UKR

droopydog53 said:

UKR, Thank you. You actually answered one of my follow up questions about the proper way to use categories. I agree and have made those adjustments, however it did not fix either of the problems.

In the Budget view, have you selected all the categories you want included in the budget?
AFAIK, adding a new category to the Category List does not automatically include it in the Budget.
Customizing a printable report to use only selected categories should work. Try not to use a combination of Select categories together with Matching choices ... I don't know if that'll give you your desired results.
IMHO, keep it simple. If necessary, start over with an uncustomized report. Most reports only show a category if there's a transaction using that category.

droopydog53

I have manually selected all of the categories that I want in the report. I did as you suggested and created a couple uncustomized (and customized) reports and I have figured out that the problem only exists with the budget reports. I have used both customized and uncustomized budget reports but it still happens. Simply put when I deselect any expense category (not connected to any kind of income) my paychecks disappear from the budget report and when I reselect the expense category, the paychecks reappear. Hmmm.....?

droopydog53

I spoke to the Quicken Support team. I shared my screen with them and they saw what I was experiencing. They concurred that I had things set up correctly but couldn't explain why it was happening. The work around that we figured out is to use the categories contained in the paycheck rather than the paycheck itself. The categories by themselves don't disappear when you deselect other expense categories. Quicken has this for action.