Capital Gains not showing in Budgets

tom21

This seems to have been brought up and not solved for years, and the appropriate discussions are closed. But I have a bit to add. When configuring the budget, the selectable categories are:

Note that Capital Gains are not listed. Here's the relevant portion of the Category List:

This shows many more categories (including those for Capital Gains) than the Budget recognizes. IMHO, seems like an easy bug to fix. This must be really old, non-maintained code.

jacobs

@tom21 I don't know for sure, but I suspect it is because, unlike the other income categories like interest and dividends, capital gains are calculated on the fly where needed (like reports and the Capital Gains Estimator), where the budget is designed to work with static values in the database.

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The overall code for the 12-month budget is rather old, dating back to 2016, and the original one-month budget code was developed years earlier for the predecessor Quicken Essentials program. There are a bunch of popular features users have been requesting for years to make the budget more useful. Our understanding is that this part of the program was very complex, and the developers were going to have to do a major rewrite of the budget code to make it possible to add requested features. And since they knew they had to rewrite it, they haven't put time and resources into adding any budget functionality which would end up scrapped in a rewrite. (We still can't even generate an actual-versus-budget report as of the end of the prior month!)

Two years ago, the developers marked several budget-related feature requests as "Planned", and last year there were surveys and outreach for customer conversations about the design of next generation budget features. But then things went silent and nothing has emerged, so we have no recent clues about what's going on or what to expect with budget improvements. I'd guess that the Mac team was directed by senior management to prioritize the ongoing development of business and invoicing features, which consumed time which might have been allocated to other major projects like the budget. And maybe they ran into some setbacks with the code, or a member of the team working on the project left, or something else derailed what they had planned. Hopefully, 2026 will bring us the long-awaited and promised improvements to the budget, but we just don't know.