Received Invoice Payments Do Not Show Up In "Budget Actual" on Budget Screen (Q Mac)

ltmiker

Received Invoice Payments Do Not Show Up In "Budget Actual" on Budget Screen

This makes either the invoicing function or the budget function unhelpful.

Quicken Kristina

Hello @ltmiker,

Thank you for sharing your experience! I tested in my own Quicken and was able to replicate the issue. It appears the problem is being caused by the Client Payment category not reflecting in the budget, and not even showing as an option to add. While it is possible to change the category to force it to reflect in your budget, doing so will break the linked payment.

I forwarded this issue to the proper channels for further investigation and resolution. If you would like to contribute to the investigation, please navigate to Help>Report a Problem and send a problem report with log files attached.

While you will not receive a response through this submission, these reports will help our teams in further investigating the issue. The more problem reports we receive, the better.

We apologize for any inconvenience!

Thank you.  

(CTP-14044)

chip.gilbert

Yes this is definitely a problem and I reported it a few months ago. It basically makes my budget useless. Even though I could get to Client Payment category and add it to the budget, it does not see payments received for the budget.

Quicken Anja

Hello @chip.gilbert,

Thanks for adding your voice here! I can see internally that you previously submitted logs for this issue back in February. In order for our development team to include your details in the ongoing investigation (CBT-751), we’ll need a fresh set of logs, as they don’t accept reports older than one week from submission.

Please follow the instructions provided by Kristina above to navigate to Help > Report a Problem, and be sure to attach your log files. This will help our team continue gathering the most up-to-date data.

Let us know once this is done!

chip.gilbert

@Quicken Anja I don't see how a log can be generated for this problem? I did support with a screen share, the support tech saw the problem, yet she pushes it off for me to report. I find this backwards.

Please tell me how a log can be created for this issue? The budget simply does not report on Client Payments. That's it, no error message, etc. so sorry but am I missing something on this?

jacobs

@chip.gilbert @Quicken Anja I did some testing on this issue as well, and I think the answer is simply (and regretfully) this: the developers have not yet integrated business income into the budget portion of Quicken Mac.

Let me take a step back to discuss the different pieces here. The budget code was developed back in 2016-2017, in the early days of the completely rewritten Quicken Mac. Some enhancements were added a few years later, particularly the ability to select accounts and categories to include/exclude, and the ability to include transfers in a budget even though they aren't truly income or expense. Over time, a significant number of user requests for added budget functionality have been registered, including budget-vs-actual reports, rollover of over/under amounts from month to month, an "everything else" line in the budget to allow users to budget only specific categories of interest but still get to a meaningful bottom line, separating budgets into fixed & discretionary sections, envelope or goal-based budgeting, and many more. None of those features have been added, although a number of them have been marked as "Planned" by the developers. My understanding from the former Quicken Mac product manager is that the existing budget code is very complex, and adding these types of features would entail a major project to significantly re-write the budget code. Last year, the developers did a survey and asked for user input own budget functionality, so this seemed to reflect that work was underway on such a project — but so far nothing has materialized.

Meanwhile, the product development team embarked on a different major project to build the Business & Personal version of Quicken Mac. the first iteration launched in December 2023, and a major upgrade with all the invoicing capabilities followed a year later. Additional business features are being added and refined every few months, as this is clearly an area of high priority for Quicken management.

But all the new business features are not fully integrated into Quicken Mac. And example is that regular reports only show business income from invoices on a single category line ("Client Payment") rather than the category(ies) assigned on each invoice via the Product(s) selected. It is possible to see the itemized income, but only when you use the Business Income Statement report, not the standard Transaction, Summary, Comparison and Crosstab reports.

The budget is another part of the program which was not integrated with the new invoicing functionality. The reason I believe this is so stems from my explanation about the state of the budget above: it has to be significantly re-written to add new functionality. I believe the developers simply did not make the effort to bring invoice income by category into the budget due to the complexity of touching the existing budget code.

I think this is an unfortunate state of affairs. With all the time and effort that has been poured into adding business functionality into Quicken Mac over the past three years, the ongoing lack of integration between invoice income and the budget and reports is disappointing. I do not have insight into whether or when the developers plan to address these shortcomings. It would be great to know from someone at Quicken whether they understand the issue and whether they have this on their development roadmap, but answers about future plans are pretty rarely addressed here.

Quicken Kristina

Thank you for your reply @jacobs,

I forwarded your hypothesis and feedback to our Mac team. Hopefully, they will provide us with some answers/insight into this. It is already late in the day, so we may not hear back today.

Thank you!

Quicken Kristina

Following up on my earlier post,

Our team is aware of the issues you brought up. They're being tracked in ticket QMAC-28834.

Thank you!

(QMAC-28834)