Budget vs Actual Reports and Exporting to Excel

Jay Gourley

Question 1: Is there a practical way to get a budget vs actual report that can expand/collapse down to the transaction level? I realize you can open a new window for each actual total and see the transactions that sum for just that total. But as far as I know, there is no report that can expand selected categories to the "actual" transactions. I'm asking because that seems like an odd omission since other spending reports do expand down to transaction level.

Question 2: Is there a way export to Excel that preserves the expand/collapse capability of reports in Quicken? If not, is there an easier way than manually doing it in Excell category by category?

Jim_Harman

1. There is no way to make a report in Quicken that shows both your budgeted amounts and the detailed spending in each Category. It is not clear to me what that report would look like. The Current budget report can have a set of columns for each time period. How would you show individual transactions in that format?
2. No, you can't directly export to Excel and retain the expand/collapse capability.

It sounds like you want something like the Itemized Categories report expanded to show transaction detail that shows the budgeted amount for the selected time period next to the actual total for each Category.

I think you could get something like that in Excel by exporting both the Itemized Category report and the Current budget report for the same time period and using the Excel Lookup function to display the budgeted amount.

Or in Quicken you could open both the Current Budget and Itemized Categories reports at the same time and display them side by side.

Jim_Harman

1. There is no way to make a report in Quicken that shows both your budgeted amounts and the detailed spending in each Category. It is not clear to me what that report would look like. The Current budget report can have a set of columns for each time period. How would you show individual transactions in that format?
2. No, you can't directly export to Excel and retain the expand/collapse capability.

It sounds like you want something like the Itemized Categories report expanded to show transaction detail that shows the budgeted amount for the selected time period next to the actual total for each Category.

I think you could get something like that in Excel by exporting both the Itemized Category report and the Current budget report for the same time period and using the Excel Lookup function to display the budgeted amount.

Or in Quicken you could open both the Current Budget and Itemized Categories reports at the same time and display them side by side.

Jay Gourley

Thanks, Jim Harman. I marked your post as an answer. Yes, your description of a budget vs actual report that can be expanded to transaction similar to the spending by category reports is what I'd like to see. BTW, I'd also like to see the collapse/expand capability in the Quicken reports be exportable to Excel. And I like your idea about combining itemized category report and current budget manually in Excel. It's tedious but less tedious than some other ways of accomplishing the same thing.