New categories not showing up in budget reports

Keith M

After 2 hours on the phone with Quicken support I have been told that you cannot add a new category to a previous year's buget, assign a transaction to that category, and have it show up in a budget report for that previous year. The transaction does show up in a transaction report as assigned to that new category but not in a budget report.

Example - in April 2023 I added a budget category to my 2022 budget and assigned a transaction in 2022 to that category. (I am behind on getting my 2022 finances in order!!) When I ran a report of 2022 transactions it shows up as assigned to that new category. However, the new category and the transaction do NOT show up in a budget report for 2022!!

This means you better have everything affecting your budget categories done exactly the way you want it by 11:59 PM on December 31 because Quicken will pour quick(en) setting concrete on your category list at midnight!🤬😰 So when you are printing your year-end budget report you are out of Quicken expertise (luck) if you don't have all your categories exactly the way you want them!

Coud this be true?? There are other threads here that talk about new categories not showing up on budget reports. I didn't find any answers there before they were closed. But maybe I missed something.

Jim_Harman

To avoid confusion, let's be careful with the term "Budget category".

You an add a new Category to Quicken and assign the Category to transactions at any time and for any date.

You can have multiple named budgets and each budget can cover multiple years. The currently selected budget is shown in the dropdown box at the top left of the Budgets page. The selected year is also shown at the top of the Budget page.

These named budgets are independent of each other and can have different sets of Categories. You can also choose different Categories to budget in different years of a named budget. If you want to add a Category to a previous year's budget, you should select the year, click on Manage Budget Categories, and select the Categories to include in that year's budget. You can do this at any time and it will not affect the Categories in other years' budgets.

When setting up a Current Budget report, selecting the named budget and the Budget year determines which Categories to include in the report, even if the date range of the report is different from the selected budget year.

In your case, if you include your new Category in the 2022 budget and set the Budget Year at the top of the report to 2022, you should see the added Category in the report.

I hope that makes sense.