Budget Changing after Sync
Starting in the spring of 2023, I noticed my budget changed significantly. At that time, I didnt bother to go figure out why. I was traveling for work a lot and very busy, so I figured tracking to budget for 2023 was shot, and I'd address during my normal year-end budget process for 2024.
So I did my budget over a few days at the end of December. And yes, the 2023 budget was all screwed up. Weird. Anyhow, I set up all my budget categories and values and all was good.
Today, Jan 6, I went to go look at my budget again, and found that it was massively screwed up. Budgeted categories were gone, existing values had changed, old budgeted categories were back, etc. Geez!! So I went looking and found the article referenced below. Sounded similar, so I resync'd and indeed my budget changed again, although not the same. This time, the categories were fine, but several of the Nov / Dec values had changed (I think to last year's budget number), plus some other ones like before. So I fixed it again and deleted all my old budgets (I had 4 historical budgets), confirmed values, and resync'd. Again it changed, but just two categories: first one for the entire year, and second one just the Dec value. Both were to last year's budget number. So I fixed these two and resync'd again. These two reverted back. So I corrected AGAIN and this time reset my cloud data. Then the budget changed back to the screwed up version from before I redid my budget in Dec? (!?!@#$%).
So I called support. I will point out that Support at Quicken has gotten so much better since the spin off. Kudo's to the Support team. Unfortunately, she was unable to help me. We went down the path that my local file was too big or corrupted. It is indeed big. My initial assets and accounts date to 1999. My detail transaction data goes back to Jan 1 2014. But that wasnt the issue. We created a new copy that started in 2018 with the correct budget and resync'd and it returned the pre-Dec31 screwed up budget.
To the Quicken Dev team, I appreciate the challenge of keeping two databases in sync (local PC file and Web). And I can appreciate that the two data structures are probably very different (legacy vs I assume more modern on the Web), making it even harder. But the budget sync has issues rendering the sync unusable if you are really trying to track to a budget. And it seems to have been introduced some time last Spring (the referenced article below looks to have been started in May 2023).
It would be nice if you could chose where to manage your budget and use that as a source of truth. Or if you could chose to NOT sync budget. For example, for me, I just use mobile for transaction entry. I only sync the CC and debit card accounts. i don't care about budget on mobile. I mean, its a nice feature so I can see how I am doing to budget on my phone, but its not critical.
My solution? Revert all the changes the nice support lady had me do, fixed my budget AGAIN, and turn off web sync. Perhaps I will try mobile/web sync again in a couple of years.