Budget Indicator

Chris Mead

If not unlike most of the power users, I have had Quicken for MAC for very long time though many product iterations. Therefore, I have a lot of expense categories. However, I only maybe 25% of the ones that are there having consolidated across the years. I can't delete them otherwise prior year reporting blows up. When transactions are dowloaded, I always have to be super carful to ensure that the expense lines up to an existing non-zero budgeted category otherwise from the budget report perspective, the expenditure will disappear and the budget verses actual is not accurate. I've lobbied in the past to have Quicken create an "unallocated" expense budget line on that report to no avail. But the idea here, if the former is not possible, is just to have the software identify when the expenditure was made to a zero budget line. At least have it flagged the user would have the opportunity to correct it when it happens.

Chris_QPW

Note I'm a Windows user, so it might be different on Quicken Mac, but I have never heard of a "zero budget line". Are you just referring to a category that you have not setup a budget for?

I know in Quicken Windows there is a very inconsistent use of what it calls "Everything Else". First off, it doesn't appear on the reports (and other inconsistencies are that scheduled reminders can be shown in the "views", but not on the reports as future "actuals"). Second, "Everything Else" changes its meaning depending on if it is viewed in the Graph view or thee Annual view. But in general, it is something like this:

Was that your original request to get something like that on the report?

And now this request would be something like a notice if they are assigning a category to a transaction that isn't in their budget?

jacobs

@Chris Mead I understand the problem you're trying to solve, but problem I see with trying to flag downloaded transactions which use a category not contained in a budget is that users are allowed to have more than one budget. So I don't think there's any way to do this at the transaction level.

I haven't given up hope for an "Everything Else" line in Quicken Mac. The developers have promised, and appear to be working on, a major revamp to the budget part of the program in order to include a number of user-requested features — from reporting to managing rollovers to envelope-type budgeting. I'm hoping an optional "Everything Else" line gets implanted as part of these improvements. Creating a budget is a big, daunting, potentially overwhelming job for many people; especially for those people create a large number of custom categories. If they allow users to choose the income and expense accounts they want, and to have the sum of all other accounts in an "Everything Else" line, it would allow users to start with a simple budget of their top or most controllable expenses while still seeing their bottom line; adding more categories would allow fine-tuning the budget, while the "Everything Else" line would continue to catch all the accounts not in the budget. Of course, as @Chris_QPW notes, such as feature needs to be implemented and integrated well so it doesn't cause more confusion than the problem it tries to address.