Budget and Actual Report

JJN003

I read about rewrites for actual / budget reports. I dont understand the difficulty.'' Its extract the data, sort the data and match to budget categories. It does not take a highly experienced programmer to accomplish. Yes it takes some thought on the Db analyst. But??? Why have a budget?

Oh for a Mac.

jacobs

@JJN003 said: I don't understand the difficulty. It's extract the data, sort the data and match to budget categories. It does not take a highly experienced programmer to accomplish.

I think Quicken is a more complex program than many users give it credit for. In the case of not having an actual-versus-budget report as of a user-specified date, I both agree and disagree that it's an easy feature to add. On one hand, there's already an on-screen actual-versus-budget column for year-to-date as of today, so adding a capability to do it as of a prior date, like the end of last month, seems like it shouldn't be too complicated. On the other hand, the budget is complicated. For instance, look at how categories and sub-categories are handled, where users can have a category amount be the total of the sub-categories or a user-entered value or both.

As someone with a bit of programming and program development background, I think it's generally best for us end-users not to try to address what would be easy to accomplish, because we just don't have enough information. But we absolutely can focus on the functionality we most need or most prioritize, and try our best to communicate that to the program developers. In this case, there is a long-running Idea thread on this forum for this functionality, and the product developers have marked it as "Planned". That tells us they not only agree on the desirability of this feature, but they have analyzed what it will take to add it, and have allocated time on their development schedule for the work to do it. But because schedules shift due to a variety of factors, Quicken chooses not to share any information about when a planned feature is expected to arrive, leaving us mostly in the dark and frequently frustrated until it eventually arrives.