Is it possible on Quicken for Mac to get a report for expenses versus the budget?

Holen1bvw

It is unbelievable to me that as a 40 plus year user of Quicken I can not get the same reports in Mac that I did in Windows. All I want to do is compare my expenses to the budget I created so I can track those expenses versus budget on a month to month basis. Why do I need a budget if I cannot compare it to expenses. Please expedite this reporting or I will be leaving QUICKEN after all these years. Thank you.

Quicken Anja

[Response removed as the referred link was merged with the Idea link provided by Jacobs' response below]

jacobs

You posted the same question in two different threads, so I'll post the same answer here as I did in the other one…

Comparing actual to budget is a long-running shortcoming in Quicken Mac which has been well-documented over the years in this Idea thread. There's no need for a new one.

Why is it available in Quicken Windows and not Quicken Mac? Because the code for the two programs is completely different, and they haven't yet written the code for Quicken Mac since abandoning the original legacy version of Quicken for Mac and embarking on the massive project of re-writing it from scratch using modern Mac tools. (I'm not saying anyone should be satisfied with the absence of this functionality; I'm just explaining why in answer to the question.) The Quicken Mac development team has a list of more than 500 feature requests from user on this site alone, which guarantees that whatever features they do tackle, it won't satisfy everyone because there are so many other features still undone. 

The good news is that the original has now been changed from "Submitted for Consideration" to "Planned". That change is about all the communication we ever get from Quicken on future plans. But this means the good — very good! — news is that the developers understand this request, have agreed that this is a desirable feature, and have it on their development roadmap with time committed 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.

FredStewart

[Removed - Duplicate]

FredStewart

Totally agree. This seems like a most basic report. All the necessary information is already in the system. This should be an easy report to create. I would like a comparision of actual YTD to budget YTD and budget annual.

JTD7

I have been waiting for this report for years. Since Quicken has decided they will no longer support older Mac OS’s (which I only use so I can run an old version of Quicken which has these report) I give up. Time to ditch Quicken and move to another companies software. Any suggestions?

curious$

Jacobs, Is it possible to get an update of the "go-live" for this important functionality/report?

The second question...When will be able to view the budget by a specific start date-end date. Now it is either a 12 month view or the budget view automatically begins the next month. For example, the Budget displays January and February. When March begins, the Budget displays the numbers for the 3 months. You cannot go back the see the results for only January and February. This relates to the discussion about a report Budget vs Actual. Thanks.

Jon

Nobody outside Quicken knows anything specific about their future plans; they don't talk about what's coming or when. We only find out about new features when they show up in beta a few weeks before getting released to everybody else. So you already know everything there is to know.

jacobs

@curious$ As @Jon says, I don't know; no one outside the development team at Quicken does, and they almost never divulge any information about what functionality is coming when. All we know is they have marked this Idea as "Planned", which means that they not only are planning to add it, but that they have time allocated to it on their development schedule to implement it. But whether it's coming next month or in 18 months, no one knows.

In posts here and product surveys I've taken, I have repeatedly pounded on the absence of a viable actual-versus-budget report as one of the most glaring holes in modern Quicken Mac; I'm truly surprised this has not been addressed sooner.

The only insight I have is that the former Quicken Mac product manager once said that the budget code in Quicken Mac is extremely complex, and his developers told him they would need to largely re-write the budget portion of the program to include some of the features users have been asking for (such as an "everything else" line to combine values for categories not included in the budget, and rollovers to handle over- and under-spending as the year goes on). My guess, and it's only a guess, is that creating an actual-versus-budget report could have been done somewhere along the way, but they chose not to do it because it would have needed to be re-done as part of a larger re-write of the budget code. One thing developers hate to do is write code for a feature which they know will need to be tossed and re-codes in a planned future upgrade. So my speculation is that getting a relatively simple budget report has been linked to — and essentially held hostage by — a much larger re-write of budget functionality. And when that's coming…? See the first part of my reply; no one knows.

curious$

So, the people who write the code have the power to ignore the customer? [Removed - Speculation] This is the first time I am faced with the dilemma regarding this application - to remain or to find another application that has a sincere concern for its paying customers. I certainly would welcome any suggestions about this issue. Does the leadership know the decision made about product enhancement comes from people who write code and not from the needs of end users? Can we, the customers, address this issue on another forum or communication platform within Quicken? Thanks.

Jon

curious$ said:

So, the people who write the code have the power to ignore the customer? 

Which customers? They can't do everything, everywhere, all at once - this isn't the movies. They have to prioritize and for whatever reason this hasn't been important enough for them to work on yet. The people writing the code for Quicken's competitors do the same thing. Maybe their priorities will line up more closely with yours than Quicken's do ... and maybe they won't. 

jacobs

curious$ said:

So, the people who write the code have the power to ignore the customer?

@curious$ I understand that this is a top, or perhaps the top, issue for you with Quicken Mac. But there are hundreds of feature requests user shave submitted to the developers. (I believe the last time I did a rough count going through all the Product Ideas sub-categegories, there were more than 500 feature requests.) The relatively small development team for Quicken Mac gets a handful or two new or improved features complete in each new release, roughly every other month. So that means there are a lot of feature wishes still under development, waiting for their time to come up on the development schedule, or on a list of future enhancements not yet scheduled for development work.

We could discuss forever whether we think they are addressing the right things in the right order, but there are (at least) two issue with doing so. First: we Quicken users all use Quicken differently, so the thing that's a top priority for you many be something I don't/wouldn't use at all, and visa versa. So the developers have to sift through all the requests and decide which to tackle when.

Second: we users can't see or know the internal issues involved in why things are done when they are. Some features require mostly interface designers; some require the database tools experts; some require the experts on connectivity services; some require coordination with other product teams (such as Quicken Windows, Quicken Cloud, or Simplifi). And for some features, there are other factors which may sideline development until the future. As I described above, it's possible that the reason they haven't created this report is because it's part of a much larger project to re-write the budget section of Quicken Mac code. In some cases, the developers need to replace outdated code like libraries and tools which affect areas of the program which were coded at different times with different tools. So while it may appear that the developers are ignoring user priorities, it it often the case that the developers need to re-architect parts of the program, or make changes to the internal "plumbing" in order to add new features. Of course, all such infrastructure work is invisible to us as users (if they don't break something), but it is necessary to support the features they (and we) want to add in the future.

I'm not saying I'm content with the absence of certain features. This one, as I've said, drive me nuts that it still hasn't been built. The absence of a number of other features makes me pound my head against the wall. I'm only saying that I understand it's not as simple as it might appear to us. Unfortunately, Quicken doesn't have a corporate culture of sharing information with customers. It's not unique to them. While some software developers have blogs or other places they share some information about product development plans, I've worked with other software developers who tend to keep their heads down working as hard as they can to make programming improvements, and not diverting time to discuss what they're doing or what they're up against with their customers.

But back to your original comment: the developers are not "ignoring the customer" simply because they haven't implemented a specific feature. If you look at the Quicken Mac release notes over the past year or several years, you'll find that most of the new features and enhanced features originated with customer requests.

So if the budget report is a critical issue to you, you have to make a decision if it's worth moving to some other software platform, including the learning curve, migrating your data, etc. There are work-arounds — exporting to a spreadsheet and creating the actual-to-budget report there — which are not optimal but which can suffice for many users until this feature gets built in Quicken Mac. For me, the spreadsheet approach is good enough for my needs. (I spent some time building a spreadsheet which allows me to export from Quicken, copy-and-paste the exported data into my spreadsheet, specify the ending month I want, and print the report, without having to re-build the formulas each time.) And I continue to hope the Quicken Mac developers will add this needed feature to the program sooner rather than later. 

P.S. Quicken management is highly unlikely to read the comments posted on this forum, so there's no value in ranting to them here.  

curious$

@Jacobs - Thank you!! The "export" idea gives me the information I need for my requirements. When I asked Customer Support about a "work around" they said the data was not available except to look at the Budget. Now I need to scout around Quicken to see what other functionality is in the current version that will make easier financial planning. Again, Thank you!!