Budgets

Big-E

Why can't the date be changed when looking at budgets for Quicken for Mac. Being able to customize the date to determine where an individual stands on the budget they created would is financial planning 101. Even if it could only be through each month end, that would be more helpful than the current format.

NotACPA

We're other users and can't answer "why" type questions … because we don't know either.

What you CAN do is to submit an IDEA type post, and see what support it gets from other users. That's how, if it gets enough votes, it gets the attention of the developers and possibly placed upon their "to do" list.

jacobs

@NotACPA No need to submit a new Idea request for this; it's been the top request among budget users since the "modern" Quicken Mac added budgeting about 8 years ago. @Big-E The developers tell us this is a "Planned" idea for upcoming development.

The Mac development team recently conducted an open survey for Mac users to contribute their wishes and expectations for the budget tools in Quicken Mac — a key step in the planning and design phase of a revamped budget section of the program. It points to new or updated budget functionality appearing in the program sometime in 2025, but of course we don't know what specifically it will do, what it will look like, or when it will arrive.

JayBugs

@jacobs I, sadly want to respond to your saying that the survey points to budget functionality showing up in 2025. To me the survey really sounded like a well throughout investigation and tallying of design feature desired in order to product a detailed revamp design. It could be that the Quicken Mac software designers, UI/UE designers, software engineers, and then QA engineers work much faster than teams I’ve run, but all that happening and releasing within 2025 seems a stretch.

I’m all in on new budget features, especially setting current as of dates for reports and most importantly rollover, but I wouldn’t bet much on that happening within 2025. My money (and subscription fee) is on 2026.

jacobs

@JayBugs 2025? 2026? Of course, we just don't know. But I'll lay out my case for 2025…

Revamping the budget code has been on the development team's agenda for years. Then last year, they changed the status of a bunch of budget features from "Under Consideration" to "Planned". That means they had done at least some preliminary planning work to assess what it would entail and how much time it would take. Then we heard nothing for quite awhile between last fall and late this summer. I suspect they've been busy working on some features which they started before the budget revamp, such as building out invoicing and other features of the then-new business tier of the program; those new features haven't appeared yet, but I expect they'll emerge from the development lab fairly soon now. And as new features are moving toward completion of implementation, the planning and design members of the team start work on the next wave of features — which clearly includes the revamped budget. The survey confirmed they are working on the budget.

And although we have no idea how far along they are, they typically reach out to users for this sort of feedback once they have completed a bit of the design work, to see if they are on the right track and if they are missing key functionality. Then things go quiet again, as the designers finish their work and hand it off to the programmers for implementation. Again, we don't know how long that will take, but we do know that the Quicken Mac team believes heavily in iterative development which results in new features being released in stages. And so my guesswork is that we'll see the first pieces of the budget revamp sometime in 2025; I just don't see them working on it for more than 16 months without releasing something. Of course, there can always be obstacles, or other external issues which divert resources and delay things. But I'm guessing we'll see something by the second half of 2025. I guess we'll see…

Big-E

Thank you everyone for your input.