FAQ: What Can You Tell Me About Budgeting?

The following information was posted by Quicken Ken at the Get Satisfaction site in January 2013.

There has been a fair amount of confusion on how budget categories rollup in Quicken 2013. We are looking at ideas on how to make this less confusing while at the same time, keeping new functionality that is being provided by the way categories rollup. In this topic, I wanted to explain how it currently works in Quicken 2013.

In 2013, we allow parent categories to be budgeted at the "total" level. This budget is the sum of all budgeted children plus any extra for everything else. Prior to 2012, this was not supported. For example, if you budget "Auto & Transport" and then have two transactions, one categorized as "Auto & Transport" and the other categorized as "Auto Payment" then

• In 2013, the budget for "Auto & Transport" will be for both the category "Auto & Transport" and all children. In the above example, both transactions will show in the actuals for "Auto & Transport".
• In 2011, the budget for "Auto & Transport" will only be for transactions categorized as "Auto & Transport". In the above example, the transaction categorized as "Auto Payment" will not show up in the actuals for "Auto & Transport".

So, in 2013, we have implemented the following rules:

• The budget for parent categories must be equal to or greater than the sum of all budgeted children. If all children are budgeted, then we make the total a readonly value and it becomes equal to the sum of all children.
• When increasing/decreasing a child budget, Quicken automatically increases/decreases the parent budget by the same amount.
• When first creating a parent budget, we set the parent budget to the average spending for that parent and all it's children. This is a source of confusion because if not all children are budgeted yet there is spending in those unbudgeted children, then the parent budget will be set to a value greater than the sum of all budgeted children.

Some tips for managing the parent budgets:

• If you want the parent budget to be equal to the sum of all child budgets, set the budget to 0 and because of the rule that parent budgets must be equal to or greater than the sum of child budgets Quicken will automatically increase it to be equal to the sum of all budgeted children. Unfortunately, you would need to do this for each month (right now, there is no easy way to do this for all months at once).
• Once the parent budget is equal to the sum of all children, because of the rule that increasing/decreasing a child budget will increase/decrease the parent budget by the same amount, Quicken will keep it equal to the sum of all budgeted children.