How to delete a temporary category in budget?

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timandmelinda
timandmelinda Member ✭✭
edited July 2022 in Budgeting and Planning Tools (Windows)
If I use a category for only half the year for my budget, for example, Christmas Fund, but then later don't want it to be included in my monthly budgets, how can I exclude it from my budget without screwing up with all the numbers. I would like to have temporary categories, such as Vacation fund and Birthday fund, and then once I'm done, have the option to take it out of the budget. I tried this before, and it screwed up my budget since I rolled over the amounts. Any advice?

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  • Chris_QPW
    Chris_QPW Member ✭✭✭✭
    edited May 2022
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    You can't remove a category mid year, but you can just set the budget amount to zero for future months.
    On the other hand if the problem is that you are still putting in transactions into that category in the future months and as such they show up as actual values that you don't want you should reconsider what categories you are using for those transactions.

    EDIT:  Note I should clarify that statement.  You can always remove a category from a budget, but if you do it mid year, it will be removed for the whole year.  There is no way to have a budget for part of a year.
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  • Sherlock
    Sherlock Member ✭✭✭✭
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    We may always remove a category from a budget when we no longer want the category to be included in the budget.  Note:  If you would like to keep a version of the budget that includes the category, I suggest you open the budget and select Budget Actions > Duplicate this budget...
  • timandmelinda
    timandmelinda Member ✭✭
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    @Chris_QPW Thanks for your answer. So for the next year, you can start over with new budget categories and the amounts don't roll over to the next year?
  • Chris_QPW
    Chris_QPW Member ✭✭✭✭
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    Each year in a budget can have different categories.  How the categories that are the same rollover or not depends on how the next year's budget is created.  Quicken is inconsistent in the way it does this.

    If you are not yet in the next year and select this button to move into the next year, you will get the dialog shown, which allows you to control this somewhat.


    On the other hand, if you were to wait until the next year not touching anything and open Quicken in that new year you get this:


    Once in any given year you can adjust what categories to use in that year.
    And as far as rollovers go from the other years, there is actually two things that you might be referring to.  The categories and budget numbers, which is addressed above.  But in general, the term "rollover" refers to the rolling over of the amounts of the budget that hasn't been used in a given month.


    When going from one year to the next where the same category is kept, and the category is set to have rollovers, Quicken will rollover the "unused/actual/rollover" from December of the last year to the new year.  There isn't any general setting to block this, but you can click on the balance link for the category, like I show below to change it to zero if you don't want one year's rollover to carry to the next year.

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