Budget Variance Report (Q Mac)

fhellmuth

Why not come up with a monthly budget variance report that looks at actuals versus budgeted for printing and exporting purposes?

Chris_QPW

Doesn't Quicken Mac already have a budget report?

That seems a pretty basic budget requirement, I would think that it has at least been requested before.

mortgagemangolfer

Yes, requested again and again, yet no action. It's pretty basic stuff, but not a report one can create. Sure would make life easier!

jacobs

Yes, this is one of the long-running major omissions in Quicken Mac. Here's a link to the longstanding request for this feature:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7716047/actual-vs-budgeted-reports-customize-date-range-and-get-comparisons-q-mac-13-legacy-votes

Happily, it is now marked as "Planned" by the developers, but as always, we never know when any particular new feature will be released.

My understanding is that in order to add other budget enhancements users have been asking for (such as 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 developers 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.

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. It's a bit of a pain, but doable.