Quicken Budget Bug - Three Paycheck Months

recursor1

Hi,

I, like many people, receive a biweekly paycheck. There are 26 paychecks and 12 months in a year. 10 of those months you receive two paychecks. 2 of those months you receive three paychecks. For whatever reason, Quicken Budget does not detect the third upcoming paycheck in a month. It can only detect two. So until those paychecks get entered in, it appears you are over-budget for that month. You can see it best in the annual view. Has this issue been reported? I imagine it has been around for awhile, and I suspect it would be really easy to fix.

I am using the latest version of Quicken Classic Premier for Windows by the way. R63.21, Build 27.1.63.21. This is not a new bug. This is just something I haven't had a chance to comment on before.

UKR

My memory may be getting a little rusty because I haven't received biweekly paychecks in a number of years, but I don't recall having problems with the Budget Annual View recognizing actual transactions for past months and scheduled reminders for the remainder of the year.
The only problem I remember having was with setting up budgeted amounts for each month, both gross income and deduction categories. I could never get Quicken to automatically define the monthly budgeted amount for those two three-paycheck-months. Best I could do was to define budgeted amounts as 1/12ths of the annual total (amount*26/12). This would give me an average budget for every month. At the end of the year it would even out. Oh, I know, that's not good enough for someone who wants to do zero budgeting or needs the monthly budget to exactly match the actual income, but for me it was good enough.

Are your paycheck reminders set up for "every 2 weeks"?
And, in Budgets, have you enabled Budget Actions / View Options / Include reminders to see the impact of reminders in future months as if they were real transactions already?

Boatnmaniac

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20497740#Comment_20497740

My recollection is similar to yours. It did work well when viewing the budget from an annual perspective provided the Paycheck Reminder was set up for "every 2 weeks".

I think part of the problem is that which months will have the 3 paychecks varies from year to year.

recursor1

So, I don't expect Quicken to automatically know which month each year contains three paychecks, but I do expect it to show the reminders from the income and transfers. I have three paychecks/reminders in the month of October. But only the amounts from two paychecks show up as scheduled in the budget. So for example, if each paycheck is 4000 dollars in salary, I only see 8000 dollars scheduled, so the budget shows I'm 4000 under for that month. That's the problem I'm seeing. I recommend you guys setup a fake paycheck and try it yourself. This doesn't just extend to salary. I know for example that I pay 8 dollars for dental insurance through each paycheck. The employee benefit-dental only shows a scheduled 16 dollars for that month, instead of 24 dollars.

recursor1

Obviously this problem goes away once October passes by and I've entered the scheduled paychecks. But I want every schedule I make reflected in upcoming months. I'm not seeing that right now, and that's a huge flaw.

Jim_Harman

@recursor1

I set up a simple test file with paychecks every 2 weeks on Fridays. Each paycheck has 4,000 Salary and 1,000 Federal tax deduction.

This year there are 2 months with 3 paychecks - Jan and August.

When Quicken sets up the budget, It correctly sets January as a 3 paycheck month (12,000 salary), makes Feb - May 2 paychecks (8,000) and sets an average of $8,666 for the rest of the year. This does not match the Paycheck data, but if you want you can manually set the correct amounts for each month.

When showing the Actuals only, it correctly shows the dates and amounts for reminders that have been accepted, but for the future reminders, it incorrectly shows 2 per month, not 3 for August as you would expect. When I go to Manage Bills and Income on the Bills and Income page and select Monthly Bills and Deposits, the Reminder dates are correct.

Does this agree with what you are seeing?

Note it appears that this issue just applies to paychecks, not to ordinary Reminders with a "Bi-weekly" interval

recursor1

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20497986#Comment_20497986

Yes, that's EXACTLY the behavior I'm describing. You can of course change the allocation to be correct, but the reminders only show in the budget for two of the three paychecks, which makes it seem like your allocated amounts are incorrect.

Not all transactions related to paychecks show as reminders in Quicken. For example, no reminders are set for the amount of money that gets transferred to my 401k. But that's not really a problem because I can manually set the allocations for each month. The issue here is that if we do have reminders, they all need to show up, or your planned budget looks wrong.

I'm a software engineer by trade, and I'm guessing this is a very quick bug fix. So it just needs to reach the devs and it will be fixed in the next update.