We have Quicken Deluxe and are overwhelmed with trying to setup a budget correctly.

c3incjjc

It seems there is a deference between selecting a parent or child category when setting up a budget. Are there any "How To's" out there for setting up budgets that give better detailed information, or steps to follow?

Thanks

Jody

Richard Schreyer

For my convenience I set up Categories as major groupings of expense such as Housing, Health, Auto, Utilities etc. and then have sub-categories to book specific expenses against. For example my Utilities Category looks like this….Quicken comes with preset categories and sub-categories just modify them to meet your needs and hide any categories or sub-categories you don't use.

UKR

Or in other words, an amount budgeted for the parent category, Utilities in the example above, does not trickle down and apply to the subcategories.
You must budget all subcategories at the lowest subcategory level. The individual amounts will then "trickle up" to form a total for the parent category and all the way up to the grand totals for Personal Income or Personal Expense, for example.

Please avoid allocating real transactions to a Parent Category. Use a subcategory instead. In Budget views and reports, transactions allocated to, e.g., Utilities, will show in a virtual category, Utilities:Other, so that the "trickle up total", the sum of all subcategories appears to be correctly totaled on the parent category line.

Chris_QPW

EDITED for typos:

Since this is in reference to the budget, I will frame my answer only on how categories are selected in a budget. If the question is about something else, please give more details on exactly what you are trying to do.

One of the biggest problems with Quicken budgets is the inconsistencies between the different views and reports. I seldom use the Graph view, mostly only the Annual view so I know it best. I'm going to use my Utilities parent/subcategories as an example.

The subcategory checkboxes should be what people think they are. The Utilities checkbox might not mean what you think, it means all the categories including the parent one. The results might surprise you. Say I don't select Water, but I select the Utilities checkbox. It will include an "Everything Else" line that includes Water (and the parent Utilities category itself). That leaves the "Other" checkbox. Other is the parent category itself, but not including anything below it. If the Other box is selected, you will get another Utilities:Other line.

In the Graph View "Everything Else" works differently. It is included whenever you don't include all the subcategories in the budget, and there isn't any way to turn it off.

Reports don't have Everything Else at all.