How can I export my budgeted amounts and my actual amounts?

Tom Auer

In the Annual View, I can show budgeted amounts only, and see budgeted amounts for all categories and all months, or I can show actual amounts only, and see actual amounts for all categories and all months. I see that I could print a rather cumbersome report showing three columns for each month (actual, budgeted, and difference), but I'd really like to get this information separately and preferably export it to Excel. I could do a rather clumsy approach to get the information separately by taking a series of screen shots. As it is, Quicken is packaging the information too closely within the application. I want to view and manipulate the information outside of Quicken. How can I do that?

Tom Young

The easiest way to do what you want to do is simply create an Historical Budget report, format it as you like, and then export that report to Excel. If something comes over that you don't want to see, like the Difference column, simply delete those columns.

Tom Auer

I see the option to export to Excel in the Reports section. While I'm perfectly capable of manipulating columns in Excel, I find that a bit disappointing, as it makes it unnecessarily difficult for users to do their own analysis outside of the application.

NotACPA

Deleting columns is "unnecessarily difficult"???

Tom Auer

Yes, and thank you for being snarky. The purpose of Quicken is to encourage users to get a better understanding of their own finances, either using the program on its own or in conjunction with other resources, such as financial services company web sites or free-standing spreadsheet applications. Quicken is a better application to the extent that it plays well with other resources, and I know that Quicken spends a fair amount of money ensuring smooth downloads from many vendors' web sites. Many Quicken users will have access to Excel, but not necessarily strong skills in Excel.