Seasonal 'estimate amount' not working

Eric4371

I have a monthly Bill and Income Reminder transaction to pay my electric bill. I would like Quicken to estimate the cost based on seasonal amount.

I click Edit > Edit this and all future instances > Estimate amount for me (change). In the drop-down menu, I change to 'Time of Year' but I get the pop-up message: 'Quicken can't find a matching transaction at this time last year'.

However, I have literally eight YEARS of monthly transactions from this same provider, classified in the exact same way. Why can't Quicken use those transactions to figure out 'Time of Year' estimates?

Mark1104

do you have a transactions literally in July 2022 for that same payee and category? is the spelling of the payee EXACTLY the same? it's not going to go back 8 years and take any sort of average, it's going to use the same payee 12 months prior. So if you paid the electric bill on June 30 and August 1, there is nothing from July, 2022 for Q to use to estimate July, 2023.

Eric4371

@Mark1104 Yes, every month, including all 12 months of 2022. Exact same payee, exact same category.

Scooterlam

Is the date of the bill payment within +/- 7 days of last years payment date? Besides the rules that @Mark1104 described, there is also this date window rule as well. Outside 7 days Quicken will not return a historical value.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20284205#Comment_20284205

Eric4371

@Scooterlam July payments have two days difference this year vs last year. June was one day.

Scooterlam

Can you try doing a file validation and repair, after doing a backup?

Can you take a screen grab of your prior year register enter and you current reminder dialog box inputs

Jim_Harman

Is this a new Reminder or one that you have been using for some time?

I have had trouble setting up estimated payment amounts for new Reminders. This is just a guess, but I think it may be looking at past instances of the Reminder rather than transactions in your register. If that is the case, it could only do seasonal estimates for Reminders that are more than a year old.

Also I have one Reminder for a credit card that I only use occasionally and thus I often skip the Reminder. But it keeps showing me an estimate based on past uses of the reminder rather than counting the skips as zeros.