Budgeting Enhancements for Quicken Classic for Mac?

Paul Galley

I'm a 30-year Quicken user, transitioned to Mac in 2014, now using Quicken Classic for Mac. About 18 months ago I wanted to focus more on budgeting, and I found this app woefully lacking in this space. I found I had to move to another app to get what I was looking for, which requires double entry of transactions. Quicken enhancements I'd like to see: 1) an option to roll over balances month to month (without respect to calendar year), 2) savings funds targets/tracking as a fund, 3) a true budget report, 4) ability to create monthly or quarterly budgets not forced into the same calendar year).

It's like budgeting features have somehow been treated as a step-child. What's up with that?

Any thoughts or feedback?

Jon

Nothing's really changed since your last post 6 months ago. Envelope budgeting and improvements to budget reports are both still Planned features but we won't know anything more until they are released, and savings goals are still "Under consideration" in spite of receiving over 400 votes.

jacobs

@Paul Galley The developers are between and rock and a hard place when it comes to making substantial improvements to the budget part of the program. They are well aware of the shortcomings of the program in this area. But the existing code is complex, and adding significant functionality likely requires a large-scale re-write of the budget portion of the program. That's doable, but it would require a major commitment of design and programming staff for an extended period of time. And the Quicken Mac development team is actually very small, so putting a designer and one or two programmers on a budget rewrite project for for 9 months or a year or more requires a major strategic decision to pursue this and let dozens and hundreds of other feature requests sit on the sidelines for all that time. And, they have metrics which tell them that the budget area of the program is not particularly heavily used — but the metrics can't tell them whether low usage is because many people don't want to spend the time to create and maintain a budget, or because the functionality is currently so poor that people avoid using it. So that makes it harder to know if they should make the major investment of time needed to develop a modern budget with the features users ask for.

I dot think they can likely walk the tightrope and address a few things — like a workable budget report —without committing to invest heavily in a complete budget overhaul. But I've been expecting that small step for years now, and they still haven't pulled that trigger. They've also started work on designing a new budget system, including user polls and one-on-one conversations, but for now, it seems those efforts got derailed due to personnel shifts or a need to tackle other issues senior management felt were higher priorities. So what will actually emerge in the budget area, and when, is still very much unknown.