MTD Actua Spending l vs Mth Budget Help Please

JJN003
JJN003 Member ✭✭
edited January 2022 in Reports (Mac)
Recently converted to MAC. Q on a PC had a spending vs budget report. Can't find one and having trouble designing one.

Comments

  • jacobs
    jacobs SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    Good news and bad news...  The good news is that there is one. The bad news is you can't control the dates it uses, which renders it somewhere between not optimal and useless, depending on what you're trying to do. ;)

    On the budget screen, make sure you're seeing the year-to-date columns to the right of the categories column. 



    If you're not seeing that column, click the << icon at the top of the categories column to make it appear.

    Now you can click Print. If you select Summary, it will give you a simple report with categories, actual, budget, and difference. If you select detail, it will also include actual/budget/difference for each month.

    So that's good, right? A Budget versus actual report is what you want.

    But the problem is that the budget YTD value is always through the current month. So since today is December 2, it's using my budget through December, but my actual spending is only through December 2. So it's not comparing apples to apples. What you'd typically want is a YTD actual versus budget report through November 30 -- and that's what you cannot do at this point in Quicken Mac. 

    Not surprisingly, this is one of the most-requested user-requested features on this site, as you can  see on this thread. Please take a second to visit that link and add your vote for this feature (in the yellow box, click the little black arrow under the vote counter).

    Back to the matter at hand...  You can get the YTD budget versus actual report you may want if you don't mind doing it in Excel or Numbers or Google Sheets. In your Quicken Budget screen, click Export and choose Export Full Budget CSV. Open that file in your spreadsheet of choice, delete the December columns, create a sum formula in the right-most column to add the months of January-November actuals, another sum formula to the right of that to add the months of January-November budgets, copy those formulas down through all the rows, and create sums and the bottom of those columns for your YTD totals. (If you want to print this as a summary report without all the monthly values, select and hide the monthly columns, leaving only the category name and YTD columns you just created.) It's certainly not optimal to have to do this in a spreadsheet outside Quicken, but if you're moderately adept at using a spreadsheet program, this actually takes only a few seconds to do, and you can get a viable actual versus budget YTD report.
    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • JJN003
    JJN003 Member ✭✭
    Got it. Its hard to believe that that report is missing. Oh well. Thanks
    Pivot tables do a great jobs of summing data .
    John
  • JJN003
    JJN003 Member ✭✭
    Hey just did a Budget Copy of my current budget and then copy pasted to Excel and the results was a budget actual report. It needed some cleanup
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