Mac Budget to include an optional "Everything Else" area for categories used that are not budgeted

@badmoves There is no "hesitancy" from the developers. What there is, instead, is a backlog of several hundred feature requests.

While this particular idea may be a "no brainer" to you, I can assure you there are many, many other feature requests which are no brainers to fellow Quicken users. Because we all use Quicken so differently, what's most urgent for one user is of limited or no interest to another, and vice versa. For instance, many Quicken users don't even use the budget area of the program, while for other users, it's the fundamental reason they use Quicken. 

It will take years of ongoing development to reduce the number of feature ideas awaiting creation; some will be delivered in the near future, while others will remain pending for a long time, as they simply don't have the staff and resources to move faster than they have been moving.

I'd note that this Idea request has garnered 25 votes over the past 15 months. There are other Ideas which have multiple hundreds of votes, and while the developers don't go strictly in vote count order, the number of votes do play a role in how high certain ideas are on their development roadmap. For anyone reading this thread who wants to see this functionality added to Quicken Mac, add your vote at the top of this thread. 

Jerry Middleton said:

Very good at putting questions on this account but where are the answers!! to the questions!!

@Jerry Middleton If you're referring to this topic, it is an "Idea" topic, where the first post expresses the desire for a new or enhanced feature in the program, and subsequent posts users elaborate on why it's a useful idea, or how they'd like to see it implemented. And there's a vote counter for other users to vote if they want to see the idea implemented. the idea of these posts it to push the feature idea to the developers, if it gets enough traction among the user community. There are no "answers" to a feature request until the developers say "here it is!" If you have actual questions about how to do something in Quicken, you should create a New Question and ask, so others here might be able to help you.

@DCKiwi You could create a simple budget to do what you want. Create a category for Budgeted Expenses. Set up a budget with that category as well as all other expense categories you use. Enter two budget values: Dining Out and Budgeted Expenses. This way, your total expenses actual versus budget will show you how much you’re ahead or behind your budget. The other categories hav no budgeted amounts, but will display your actual spending so you can see where your funds went.

The question I was answering was for someone who didn't want to bother budgeting individual expenses, and just wanted to see how their spending in aggregate compared to a general discretionary expense budget amount.

So my suggestion wa to create a dummy account for "Budgeted Expenses." (Actually, if you priced it with an asterisk, it will alphabetically jump to the top of your expense categories, as shown in the example below.) This wouldn't be used for any transactions; it's just a category for the budget, where you'd enter your total monthly expense budget. (This could be all expenses, or just discretionary expenses, or just selected categories of expenses — whatever fits your budgeting needs.) Then hiding this category is a good idea, so you don't accidentally use it for actual transactions.

Then add to your budget the categories you want to track and compared to your total Budget Expenses. Don't enter any budget values for these categories. They will just reflect your actual spending.

Here's a sample, simplified budget with just a few expense categories…

In this dummy budget, I'm showing a Budgeted Expenses amount for each month of $2,500, for a total of $30,000 for the year. The four expense categories tracking actual expenses total $29,138.75 for the year. The difference column shows that I finished the year $861.25 better (less spending) than my budget. (The test file I used here doesn't have all my 2024 data, so I made it a budget for 2023; there are 12 months, but the screenshot shows only the first four so it doesn't shrink to an unreadable size.)

I didn't include income, but you can do the same thing for income categories. Or if you have limited income categories, you can budget them individually and avoid creating a dummy account for Budgeted Income.

Let me know if this makes sense, or if I need to explain it better.