Does Time of Year bill estimate work?

Marconi Menezes

I waited a full year of electricity bill payments to finally activate the estimate amount based on time of year. Electricity bills vary significantly seasonally and I was looking forward to improving my projected balances using this feature.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work. Instead of using the corresponding previous year's monthly bills to estimate the values separately for each coming month, it simply used last year's January value for all coming bills. This messed up my projected balances. It's worse than having it manually set to an average fixed value.

Am I misunderstanding the feature or is this a bug?

Jim_Harman

I have had issues with estimates as well. I have not studied it in detail, but I think the date window for finding past payments is quite small.

Also I have found that if I skip Reminders, as with payments for a credit card that I seldom use, it uses the Reminder amount rather than zero when computing the average.

mshiggins

During that year of utility payments, did you use a reminder to Enter the utility payments?

Marconi Menezes

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20405995#Comment_20405995

Yes, I did. I have been planning for this since a year ago. :-)

The proof that I did is the fact that it used the exact value from the corresponding month a year ago. I guess that if it had not been from a reminder it would not know what value to estimate. The problem is that it then used this same value for all coming months, instead of pairing the values from each corresponding month.

It does look like a bug to me. Does it work for you guys?

Marconi Menezes

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20405948#Comment_20405948

Thank you for your comments, Jim. I'll keep an eye on the average estimates too, in case they don't work as expected.

In this case, however, I'm not using the option "previous payments", which is based on an average of a selected number of the most recent payments. I'm trying to use the option "time of year", which should simply look at the same bill from 12 months ago.

Chris_QPW

My guess is that it has never worked right. Or at least it has been broken for a very long time.

I have also caught the "estimate based on the last X" to not work right too. As in, it did that estimate when I first created it, but didn't update it after that.

I might do some more testing on this to see where it is now.

Chris_QPW

I'm going to call this one, "sort of misunderstanding", but also based on the current feature set, a bug/missing feature.

I start with a piece of information that I'm sure @Marconi Menezes doesn't know, and that is that Quicken only has one instance of any given reminder. In other words, it has a stored value for the next reminder, but nothing after that. It has long been a feature request to have the ability to have different reminders into the future, but it hasn't been implemented.

So, to me it isn't surprising of what Quicken is doing, but also based on the fact that we can now have reminders in our accounts, and projected balances I would argue that it is a "bug" that the future reminders are a "fixed amount".

Quicken is doing the "right thing", but only for the month that it happens to be on at that time (current reminder month).

Here is my test case:

As you can see, it is doing the right thing as the reminders are entered into the register. 1/1/2023's amount goes into 1/1/204, and 2/1/2023's amount goes into 2/1/2024, and on. But look at what happens to "future reminders". They are all fixed amounts based on the next reminder to be entered. Back before they had reminders in the register, projected balances, and budgets this would have worked fine, but now it isn't OK anymore.