Custom Budget Report
I'd like to create a report that compares actual to budgeted but I want this for a specific set of weeks not by month. Can this be done? If not, can this feature be added in a future release?
Tx
Glenn
Comments
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There is only rudimentary reporting available in the budget section of Quicken Mac. Even the simple desire to generate a report of budget versus actual through the end of last month/quarter/year is not readily available. This is one of the top feature requests users have been bugging the developers to address.
Fortunately, the developers have now marked this feature request as "Planned", which means it's secured a spot on their development roadmap. We just don't know when it will arrive. I keep homing it'll be soon… but it's been a long wait!
For the current time, the only way to get an actual versus budget report is to export your budget to a spreadsheet, delete the columns for future months, create columns to sum the remaining months of actual values and of budget values. Not optimal, but doable.
Going back to your original question, though, I want to point out a potential problem. You said you want to compare budget versus actual for specific weeks, not months. The problem is that the budget values only exist for each month, not day by day or week by week. So even if you were able to compare, say, July 1 through September 15, the program would compare actual values for those 10 weeks to budget values for the three full months of July-September. I think the best you'll ever be able to do is compare actual to budget for a range of full months. (I suppose the program could allocate values proportionally for every day of a month, but that isn't exactly accurate either when you have things like once-a-month rent/mortage payments, bi-monthly patychecks, etc.)
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19930 -
I don't care about weeks vs months, but I desparately need custom end dates for actual to budget comparisons. As an example, I need to see September year to date (for both actual and budget) after the calendar has moved into October. Currently I would see September YTD (assuming I had cut off my posting of actuals on Sept 30) but I would see October YTD budget. Once the calendar moves to October 1, the October budget is included in YTD totals.
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@DRoten Yes, what you describe is exactly what nearly every Quicken Mac budget user want and needs! As I noted above, the Idea thread for this functionality has been marked as "Planned" by the developers, so it's definitely on their roadmap of development plans.
Unfortunately, there's no way for us as users to push them to do this sooner rather than later. My understanding is that in order to add other budget enhancements users have been asking for (monthly rollovers of over- and under-spending, an "everything else" line to aggregate all categories not included in the budget in order to get to a bottom line of actual income/expenses, and more), the developer have to largely re-write the code for the entire budget section of the program. Adding this report by itself would seemingly be fairly easy to implement, but if the code would need to be scrapped and re-created as part of a revamped budget module, they may be waiting so they can lump all the budget projects together. Which unfortunately leaves users with no functional way to get a budget report through the end of the prior month. It makes me think no one on the development team or management actually uses Quicken Mac for their own budgeting, or they would surely join us in seeing how ridiculous the current shortcoming is.
Meanwhile, the only viable workaround I know of is the one I mentioned above: export to a spreadsheet, delete the current and future months (e.g. leaving January through September), create a formula to sum the actuals YTD, budget YTD and difference YTD, and a row to sum them all down to a bottom line (being careful not to double-count main- and sub-categories).
One way to make this re-usable in the future is not not delete any months — e.g. leave January through December — but fill in zeros for the current and future months. Then next month, export your budget again, open the exported spreadhseet, copy just the columns for the year to date period (e.g. January through October), open the budget spreadhseet you build with all the formulas, and paste in the updated columns. This way, you don't have to re-create all the total columns and row each month; once you build the initial spreadsheet, future months just require a quick export, copy, and paste. (If you plan to do this, just make sure you try to include any category you think you may want when you start; if you add categories in Quicken, the rows will change position in the exported spreadsheet, and you'll have to re-build the row which sums each column because categories and sub-categories will have shifted.)
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19930
