How to show planned carryover as actual income

nk94555

I have monthly remaining account in the bank, which I am using as planned income. Now how do I account for this as actual income for the month. Otherwise it shows as negative actual income,

jacobs

I don't understand your statement: "I have monthly remaining account in the bank." Did you mean you have monthly remaining money in the bank?

Now how do I account for this as actual income for the month.

If you have money left in the bank at the end of one month, it can't be counted as income for the next month. Income was recorded when you originally received the money; you're not receiving it again in the following month.

Otherwise it shows as negative actual income

I'm not understanding this. Where is money in your bank showing up as negative income? If you spend down the money in the bank, that's using up an asset, not "negative income". Do you mean that your expenses exceed your income in the month, so your bottom line for the month is negative? Well, that's what happened in the real world. In the prior month, your income exceeded your expenses which is what gave you the leftover money in the bank account.

Perhaps I'm not understanding what you're describing or trying to reflect, so please reply back with more detail. And where are you looking at your monthly income and expenses? Report? Dashboard? Budget?

nk94555

I apologize for not being clear.

1. This is Budget tab.
2. To plan the month budget at the beginning of the month, I add planned income as carryover from the previous month. Amount : X
3. I get regular income Y, so total planned income is X + Y for planned expenses for the month.
4. Now Y income happens during the month. But there is no entry for X income
5. Actual income is only Y and less than planned income.
6. So, at the end of the month I have more expenses than income in the budget.

There should be a way to make an entry for carried over income as actual income, so budget balances out at the end of the month.

Hope it's clear now.

jacobs

@nk94555 Ah, thanks for the follow-up post. It definitely wasn't clear you were talking about budgeting; now it makes sense. So what you're asking for as called envelope budgeting or budget rollover (not quite the same, but two parts of the same concept), where over- and under-budget amounts get rolled into the next month. That feature doesn't yet exist for Quicken Mac. However, there is an Idea thread (feature request) for envelope budgeting which the developers have marked as "Planned", so it will be come in the future, but we don't know how far in the future.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7445030/envelope-budgeting-q-mac-9-merged-vote

So for the time being, you can only make manual tweaks to your budget each month if you want to see this reflected month by month. For instance, if you budgeted $500 for groceries in April, and your actual groceries spending is $425 at the end of April, you could edit your budget, reduce April's groceries budget to $425 and increase May's grocery budget to $575. Doing this for every budget category, to the penny, is more tedious than I think anyone would want to do. But identifying a few major over/under categories each month and making such tweaks can be completed in a few minutes a month.

nk94555

Thanks Jacob for detailed response. My question is not about rollover expenses but accounting for carry over income from previous month.

1. You end the month with say $1000 in bank. This is money to spend in the next month.
2. I mark this money as planned income in budget
3. But in reality there is no way to record $1000 as actual carry over income.
4. Budget will always say $0 for actual against $1000 planned, so budget income is always short by $1000
5. I am trying to match actual against planned

jacobs

Money in the bank is an asset; you’re conflating it with income. And when you’re budgeting, you keep wanting to count it as actual income — which you can’t because it’s not.

If you have $1,000 in the bank at the end of the month, you want to add that to any new income in the next month and used that combined total as your expense limit for the month, right? So since we’re talking about just the bottom line, not spending category by category, why not just focus on that bottom line in the budget. For instance, say you just ended April with $1,000 in the bank. Now look at your budget for May. If your budgeted income minus expenses is less than a loss of $1,000, you are okay; if it’s greater than $1,000, you need to reduce one or more budgeted expense categories to get it under $1,000.

nk94555

I totally understand that and it's like budgeting in my mind. But I want to make sure that end of the next month doesn't show as negative. I wish there was a way to use the left over as cash carry over to next month income and then next and so on. Anyway, thanks for engaging with me on this topic. Appreciate your feedback.