Sum of category overwritten by previous year actuals, but not obvious and problematic
I want my top category to sum up the sub categories, but because I started with last year's data, the top categories data it's very misleading. In my example screenshot, the subcategories add up to $2407.16, but that's only because I manually typed in "0" in the Food row for that month.
In another example, if I simply go to Food and type in a smaller value (like -$0.01), it will completely zero offset all of the sub categories for that month. In other words, my overall budget for that month (and year) are miscalculated by $2407.17.
It seems like the program should be highlighting these values, showing them italicized, or something to alert the user that it's not actually the sum of the subcategories, but includes another value.
Am I doing something wrong or overlooking how to do this correctly?
Answers
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It's possible to spend money in a category even if it has subcategories. If Quicken sees you spending money each month that's categorized simply as "Food", then your "Food" total is going to be more than the sum of its subcategories. At least that's how it's behaving when I set up a budget. In my case, I don't spend any money in "Food" so my Food budget is equal to the subcategory spending, but in "Household" I frequently spend money that's not in any of its subcategories under that, so my "Household" budget ends up higher than the sum of its subcategories.
If you want to ignore any "Food" spending & budget only for the subcategories then you'll have to edit your budget & replace the Food amounts by hand.
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I guess my point is that it's not obvious that it's overwritten. It appears to be a sum, but in reality there are other dollars embedded in that top category.
Maybe this becomes a feature request, but I'd like to be able to easily see when a top budget category is not only summing subcategories, but includes it's own embedded dollars. Highlighted, italicized, etc.
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