Budgets

Ralph Gillis

How can I create a budget that is not on a timeline? I want to enter expected costs for a project with budget amounts for several vendors.

UKR

Hmmm … A budget in Quicken works with recurring monthly income and expenses.
If you want to track a project like building a house you could create all the necessary expense categories, like landscaping, plumbing, roofing, etc. and then, for this month, enter the budgeted total cost for, e.g., $20,000 for landscaping, $10,000 for roofing, etc. Set each of the budget categories to roll over unspent amounts to future months.

Add an income category for total cost of project (as if you had deposited $500,000 into your checking account).

As the project goes along and you start spending real money, record the expenses and watch the Budget view update the remaining amounts and show you how much money is left over.

Tom Young

I suppose you could even create "Categories" that are actually the Vendors' names and charge costs to these "Categories."

If you basically want to establish opening "Total Budgets per Vendor" and always know where you are with this, you could establish those "budget" numbers in the first month of the project's start for all the Vendors, with no budget amounts ($0) in the subsequent months, then create a saved customized Budget Report with an Interval of "None" or "Month" as you wish and a custom date of "1st month of activity" to "Today." The last column of that report will always report the cumulative over/under of Budget to Actual.