Budget Categories - need ideas/help

9Scoops

Hi - I set up a budget using a subset of categories and unselected the others as I won't need them. However, when I log an expense all categories are available and it leads to the budget tracking not being accurate. From my investigation on this forum and elsewhere, this is a known issue without a fix.

My thought was to simplify my budget to the fewest number of categories possible so it's easier to remember. Rather than having 25-35 categories, maybe have 10. Hoping users on this forum can share which macro-level categories they find useful in budgeting their expenses.

Thanks!

jacobs

I'm a little confused, so maybe you can clarify. You said you set up your budget to use a small subset of all the categories. No problem with that; many people don't want to try to budget for every category. But if you don't include all categories in your budget, then it won't give you a complete report of your income and expenses. It's your choice: (a) include all categories you use in your budget, and your actual income and expenses in the budget will match your actual income and expenses in a category (profit and loss) report, or (b) don't include all the categories in your budget, and just use it to see how you're faring in these categories you've decided are most variable or discretionary.

There's no "known issue" with budget accuracy problems that I'm aware of.

Now, there is a feature request by some users to have Quicken create an "everything else" line in the budget, in which Quicken would tally up all the other categories you haven't included in your budget, so you could see your bottom line without budgeting every category. The developers haven't yet indicated if or when they might add such a feature. (According to some Windows users, who have had such a feature, there are some issues with it that makes it less than a panacea.)

There are a few way to simplify what you track in Quicken. One is to use few categories overall. You can delete most of Quicken's default categories if you don't use them or find them useful distinctions, and use a smaller set of categories to simplify your reporting, and by extension, your budgeting. One problem with this is that if you download your transactions and rely on Quicken to auto-categorize income and expense categories, deleting a lot of Quicken's categories will make it unable to map many Payees to categories it knows — so you'll have to manually categorize more transactions, or create QuickFill rules so Quicken knows to how match your Payees to your list of categories.

Or if you want to eep categories alone, but simplify budgeting, then we come back to what I first wrote above. You can select a subset of your categories to include in your budget, but it won't get you a complete bottom line. Many people are fine with that; they budget a limited number of categories and use the budget to eyeball unexpected or unexplained deviations between budget and actual in these categories. It all depends on what your goal is in using the budget features of Quicken.

9Scoops

Thanks for the reply! Hoping I can clarify but I think you got most of it.

I have unselected many of the standard budget categories, leaving me with approximately 35 left that I want to use. However, when I got to classify an expense, the full list of categories is available (not just my 35), so things often get categorized wrong, and therefore not trackable when looking at my performance to budget.

I think my phrasing of "known issue" wasn't proper. I had done some investigating if there was a way to limit the available categories when logging expenses to only the ones that you have budgeted for. That doesn't seem possible.

My workaround was to further reduce my list of categories to a smaller number, hopefully allowing me to just remember those and use them. My ask of the community was which subgroup of categories they find most useful.

Hope this helps and truly appreciate the support!

jacobs

So aside from those 35 categories, do you actually use all the other categories? If seems like you're saying that's the case if you don't want to see the others when categorizing a transaction. So if that's true, you can delete categories you don't use. They won't show up in drop-down choices when categorizing a transaction, and they won't be in the budget. 😀 You can always add categories in the future if you find you need something new; you'd add the category, and then go to your budget to add it to the budget.

In the Window > Categories window, you can delete any unused categories. You can look at the "Status" column to see which ones you've never used. In that same window, you can also merge two or more categories into one if in the past you've used two categories which you're now simplifying int one. (Merging categories will update all transactions in your database which used the category being merged out of existence.) You can't delete any of Quicken's Investments sub-categories, because they are used in behind-the-scenes investment calculations, and there are a few other Required categories you can't delete or merge — but most categories in Quicken's default set can be deleted if you don't need them.

9Scoops

I only want to use the 35. I didn't realize if I deleted the other categories it would remove them from the drop -down when doing my transactions. I'm going to play around with it today and may come back for another question or two.

Really appreciate the help!