Budget Select Accounts Not Working (Q Mac)

gr802 · July 23

I filed an incident and sent Quicken dev a file they could analyze they are not responding in over three weeks. Wanted to see if anyone else has this issue? The support tech on the phone was able to replicate my issue on his Mac so I don't think my use case is unique. To be honest it's pretty fundamental to budgeting with Quicken for Mac so not sure why dev is not prioritizing this higher.

When you create a budget you can select accounts and categories. I have multiple budgets for different accounts that I am tracking. For example a fixed budget for fixed expenses like mortgage and a variable budget for discretionary spending like dinning out.

The issue is that even though I am only selecting one account for each budget, the budget dashboard is selecting categories from accounts I did not select. This of course throws of the entire budget. To me this seems like a clear bug and I don't think my use case is that out of the ordinary.

Thoughts?

jacobs · July 24

@gr802 I'm not sure what you're referring to as the "budget dashboard". There is not (yet) any Dashboard (Home > Dashboard) for budgets. Or do you just mean the main budget screen?

even though I am only selecting one account for each budget, the budget dashboard is selecting categories from accounts I did not select.

Help me understand this a bit better… You select one account for a new budget. This budget by default shows all your categories, many of which may have zeros, unless you select categories to remove which you know aren't relevant for this particular limited budget.

Are you saying that actual income/expense amounts are showing on the main budget screen which do not exist in the selected account? For instance, if you had $500 in car repair expense in a credit card account, and you set the budget to only include your checking account, this $500 from the credit card account is showing up in the checking account budget?

I just tried a few limited tests and wasn't able to reproduce what I think you're describing. When I removed an account from my budget, the income/expense in that account disappears from the budget as one would expect; when I set the budget to include just one account, the income/expense in the budget matches a report of actual income/expenses. But maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.

I don't recall other reports here of the budget ignoring account selections.

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As for hearing back from the Quicken Mac development team… generally, you won't. Unless they need more information from you, there's usually not communication back to users about bug submission reports. Often users submit what they are convinced is a bug, but the developers determine that the code is actually working as expected and the issues is with the user's data or user's expectation how a particular feature should work. If you were given a ticket number for your case, though, you can share it here and one of the Quicken moderators may be able to check the status to see if it has been deemed not a bug, or has been addressed in the code for an upcoming release, is still open. You say you reported the issue three weeks ago and wonder "why dev is not prioritizing this higher". I'm not sure how you know that they aren't, since there have been no new releases of Quicken Mac in the past three weeks; they don't release a new version every time a bug is fixed.

Some bugs are found and fixed shortly after being reported, while other bugs remain in their database for possible future action for months and years. It depends on their perception of the severity of the bug, how many people it likely affects, whether there is any workaround for users in the meantime, and the complexity of fixing the code. Since they have stated they plan some significant revisions to the budget portion of the program in the future, it's possible they might decide not to spend time revising the existing budget code which is already planned to be re-written.

gr802 · July 28

Thanks for the insight. Was pretty sure it was a bug when the tech on the phone re-created the problem in minutes. My ticket is #11825641.

As an aside, Quicken should have never gotten rid of the budget report. At least that could be a fall back to this new dashboard style report failing.

gr802 · July 28

I started using Quicken in the 1980's on my first DOS PC and never stopped. The most fundamental reason? Put money in an account, track if you are spending what you planned. Right now this effectively does work in Quicken for Mac unless you create one consolidated budget with all your accounts combined together. Quicken added the feature in their budgeting to select categories and accounts, the software should work that way.

jacobs · July 29

@gr802 You asked if anyone else was experiencing the issue you described. As I wrote above, I tested and got different — correct — results. That is, if I create a new budget and I include only one account and all categories, the main budget screen correctly shows actual income and expenses for just that one selected account; if I add another account with transactions int he same categories, the main budget screen reflects the transactions from both accounts. I'm not sure what it is about your data other parameters you're selecting which results in you seeing different results than what I'm seeing.

Since I haven't seen anyone else reporting this as a problem, I'm thinking there is something about your data or budget configuration causing you to get wrong results, but I can't really troubleshoot with you further without more information which would allow me to try to replicate the problem you've described. Conversely, maybe you could construct a simple test like this…

Create two dummy transactions dated this month, in a category you're not currently using, for $100 in one account (account A), and $200 in a different account (Account B).
Create a new test budget, and set it to include both Account A and Account B.
Check the main budget screen for the category used in your test transactions, and verify that it shows $300 this month (from the $100 in account A and the $200 in Account B).
Now Edit Budget and remove Account B from the selected accounts.
Back on the main budget screen, the category should show just $100 in expense now, because the transaction in Account B is no longer included.

bdkauff · July 30

I'd like to chime in and say that I am having the same problem.

I'm not sure I've figured out what's going on, but I think that editing categories and accounts doesn't result in income and expenses that satisfy BOTH of those filters. It seems like an expense in a category that is selected but not in an account that's selected STILL results in that category showing up in the budget.

I did the proposed test, @gr802 and it behaved as it should.

Will poke around more but its very confusing.

gr802 · July 31

@bdkauff thank you for chiming in. So confused are you saying you duplicated the issue or it behaved as it should?

bdkauff · August 1

I was able to figure out the problem, and it was user error + confusing UX. This whole time, Edit→Select Categories→Show was on "Used". I assumed that once you selected "Used", the resulting checkboxes are now your palette of selections for what's in the budget. BUT, there were other "Unused" categories that, when shown, were ALSO checked/selected. I had to go through all those and make sure the right ones were selected or not selected.

Hope this helps someone in the future. Very annoying!

[Edited for grammar]

gr802 · August 9

@jacobs and @bdkauff thank you for taking time to explore my issue but you are not testing my use case/issue. Let me try to explain this again.

Create two budgets (Variable and Fixed). Variable = expenses like dinning out, gas for cars etc. and Fixed = montage, car pmt. etc.
Assign Fixed budget to checking account one
Assign Variable to checking account two
Select unique categories for each budget
Run reports and examine dashboard reports for categories.

Now when I go into the Variable budget for example and look at spending for categories like "dining out" I see transactions from both checking account one and two even though in the variable budget I did not select checking account one. Also, the Fixed budget does not have Dinning out selected as a category. My issue here is Quicken gives us a way to create separate budgets and to select separate accounts and categories for each budget but the program is not maintaining unique selections when you drive down to the individual transaction level.

I hope this clarifies?

This is a bug!

What I want to know is how I can get them to fix it?😕

gr802 · August 9

Sorry catching up on all the responses. Yes @bdkauff Cx is confusing. I never select a parent category in a budget. I just stick to specific subcategories. That ensures only what you are trying to measure appears. If you select a parent categories (do not do this) Quicken will show subcategories even if you do not check them in the budget settings.

gr802 · August 9

I created a new clean Quicken account and once again replicated this issue. Attached are 10 screenshots to prove I am not making this up. The most important is the budget detail screen shot for the Fixed Budget which clearly shows transaction from both the Fixed and Variable account but I also showed the screen shot that in this Fixed budget I only selected the Fixed checking account.

Again, this is a bug. Quicken if you pay attention to this forum, please fix this an even better own it and add a reply to this post.

See screenshots below.