How to create a future budget with no actuals carry over

Question

I am trying to create a Budget for 2023 but when using the Quicken create budget function it keeps including all the actuals from my 2022 budget. All I want is a brand new budget with the category budget amounts being filled with the prior years actuals for  those categories or even just reuse the budget amounts for each category from the prior year but with all actuals equal to zero. Is this possible through Quicken?

UKR · Answer

You are looking at future numbers, a forecast. These numbers can, of course, only be as good as the information available to Quicken at this very moment. There's no crystal ball in Quicken.
When you learn about a change, input it into the reminder and the budget will reflect the new actual for the remainder of the year.
And it doesn't matter whether the reminder is set for "Auto Enter" or "Remind Me". The budget shows either type of reminder.

jtgostars · Answer

Thanks I figured out the best way to build a budget for 2023 from the existing 2022 budget as a base was to actually wait until it was 2023. Not sure I agree with that approach as any budgeting I have ever done in the past was always done 2 -3 months prior to the beginning time frame for the budget.

As to the actuals showing up I figured out that Quicken will take any of your bills/income you have set up for "Automatic Entry" will show up in the new budget actual amounts for the entire 12 months. Again not something I would recommend as 9 out of 10 times what ever amount you have set up for automatic entry will probably increase over the prior year.

I think I might try Mint although in the past its been somewhat inflexible for some of the budget features I am looking for. And Personal Capital does not offer a true budget vs actual functionality.

Chris_QPW · Answer

That is exactly what happens if you just open your existing budget in the new year (provided you didn't extend it into the new year last year).  You can make a copy of this budget if you like.  But note that once a budget is opened/extended into a given year you can't reverse that short of going to a backup.

By definition the "actuals" are zero for the next year provided you don't have any transactions posted for this year and have turned off showing the reminders as actuals.

As for leaving the budget numbers alone, the only way to do this is if you have extended the budget while the current system date is in the last year (like 12/31/2022).  You would have to go to a backup before the budget got extended, and set your system date to 12/13/2022, open the budget and then click on the arrow to extend it into 2023 and you would get a prompt like this (note I'm showing extending into 2024 because my budget is already extended into 2023 and I don't want to take the time to go back to 2022 backup and date just for an example):