Budget report (Q Mac)

You can't. Or not directly. The lack of actual-versus-budget reports for a user-specified time period is a longstanding complaint of Quicken Mac users who utilize the budget functionality of the program. While the developers face competing demands for many features, it continues to surprise me they haven't addressed this yet. We can only hope such an enhancement is on their shortlist for implementation later this year.

That said, there is a viable workaround, but it requires a minute or two to produce the budget comparison in a spreadsheet. Even if you're not a spreadsheet wizard, it's pretty straightforward. Here's how:

• In Quicken's budget screen, click on the Export icon in the upper right, and select Export Full Budget to CSV.
• Open the CSV file in Excel or Numbers. The spreadsheet columns have the categories followed by three columns -- Actual, Budgeted, Difference -- for each month of the year.
• Delete the columns to the left of any months you want (say, January through March if you want a report for the second quarter), and to the right for all the months after the time you want to see (July-December in this case)
• In a blank column, on the first row of numbers, construct a formula the add the Actual values for each of the months. For instance, in Excel, that formula is "=C10+F10+I10" or "=SUM(C10,F10,I10)"
• Click that cell and Fill Right for two columns, creating the sum of Budgeted and Difference values.
• Select those three YTD cells you just created, and Fill Down down the entire length of the spreadsheet.

In those columns you created, you now have the Actual, Budget and Difference for the months you retained. In the three top summary rows, you have total Income, total Expenses and total Difference (aka your bottom line gain or loss). If you want a nicer-looking report to keep or print, you can do additional work to improve the appearance of the spreadsheet if you wish, like creating column headings over the three YTD columns you created, bolding key values, eliminating some of the header rows, etc.

Once you've done this a time or two, you'll find you can create such a spreadsheet in a minute or two, so you can get a viable budget-versus-actual report whenever you want one. It's obviously not as simple as being able to generate such a report in Quicken, but it is do-able.