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When Creating a Budget, How to you Select a Previous Year?

NotFrankB

The Quicken Windows Help page How do I create a budget? says "Budgets default to the current year. Use Advanced Budget Settings to adjust this if needed."

It isn't obvious (to me anyway) how Advanced Budget Settings are used to adjust the year used. There doesn't seem to be anywhere to enter a year and both choices under "Budget Year" seem to create a budget for 2025.

It appears Advanced Budget Settings can use a different starting month for the year, but still uses the current year's data.

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Windows

Accepted answers

Chris_QPW

When creating a new budget, you select the fact that you want to transfer information from the past 12 months (you can't pick the timeframe) to the new budget in the next dialog.

The "expanded options" on the dialog you are on is for people that aren't using the calendar year (Jan to Dec).

Once the categories are selected, Quicken should look at the past 12 months of and fill in guesses of what the budget should be.

Note others have stated that they aren't getting the behavior of Quicken putting in the budget numbers, but I don't know what is going on there.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7959819/budget-values-and-categories-do-not-copy-to-next-year

All comments

Quicken Anja

Hello @NotFrankB,

We appreciate you reaching out!

To clarify, are you trying to create a new budget for a previous year (if so, which year), or are you trying to create a new budget for the current year using data from a previous year's budget?

Please check back and let us know! Thank you.

UKR

After creating a new budget table and you want to go forward, or in your case, back to a previous year, go to the Budgets view and select the "Annual View" instead of the Graph View.

This example image shows how to extend the budget to next year. In your case, you would click the "[<]" icon to go back to the previous year.
AFAIK, if available in your current data file, last year's transaction data would be used to show actual amounts by category.

You will have to manually enter monthly budget planning amounts by category for a month and copy these amounts forward for the remainder of the year. Start with Jan 2024 to define your budget amounts.
To copy one category's budget amount forward for the year use the gear icon in the category's name field.
To copy all categories' budget amounts for one month forward for the year in one transaction click the monthly column header's ▾ icon, e.g., "January ▾"

NotFrankB

Thanks for the reply, Anja. I'm trying to create a budget for 2025 using actual spending from 2024.

I had thought that to do that I would create a budget for 2024 and then roll it forward into a budget for 2025. But it sounds like I'm mistaken.

NotFrankB

Thanks for the reply UKR. I should have been clearer in my original post. I don't have a budget to extend into the next year. Taking your screenshot as an example, I don't have a 2019 budget to copy.

I could create a 2025 budget and then copy it to 2024 but then I'd have a 2024 budget based on 2025 spending (which is a limited set of information obviously).

What I'm trying to do is create a fresh new 2025 budget based on actual spending from 2024. I could take the Spending Itemized Categories report for 2024 and manually enter a 2025 budget from that data. I was hoping there might be an easier approach.

Chris_QPW

When creating a new budget, you select the fact that you want to transfer information from the past 12 months (you can't pick the timeframe) to the new budget in the next dialog.

The "expanded options" on the dialog you are on is for people that aren't using the calendar year (Jan to Dec).

Once the categories are selected, Quicken should look at the past 12 months of and fill in guesses of what the budget should be.

Note others have stated that they aren't getting the behavior of Quicken putting in the budget numbers, but I don't know what is going on there.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7959819/budget-values-and-categories-do-not-copy-to-next-year

NotFrankB

Well, colour me embarrassed! Thanks Chris.

I had jumped to the conclusion that the new budget was being created using 2025 spending. I guess the problem is that I'm creating a budget in February. I looked at the January budget numbers for some insurance premiums and recognized they were set to 2025 values. I should have looked more closely at the numbers in other months. :-(