make a 2024 budget now or wait until 2023 is over

I'm sorry I disagree, most likely that isn't what you want to do because of the strange way that they give you the options on how to extend the budget. This is something that gets complained about every year and never changed.

If you wait until 2024 the moment that you open that budget Quicken is going to force it into 2024, and it isn't going to give you any kind of option on how to do it. If you extend the budget while in 2023 it will give you this dialog for the possible options:

The "default" that you will get if you just open the budget in 2024 is the default one you see above. Which means that Quicken will simply copy your categories and budget numbers from 2023 to 2024. Clearly if that is what you want, you don't have to wait, because those are the numbers you have already set.

The most likely reason to want to wait till the end of the year as @UKR points out is valid Quicken uses the last 12 months for the second option above, and that would mean at this date you would get the actuals from the second half of December 2022, which might not be what you want if there is a big difference between the ending actuals of 2022 and 2023.

I have complained for many years that the above options should always be available, but that has never been changed. The bottom line is that if you want any either of the last two options you have to extend your budget while in 2023. One could do this in January by first setting the date back to 12/31/2023 and then opening the data file/budget and extend it (changing the date back after you have done that). Or say do it on 12/31/2023 (or close to it).

A bug in the New Report Features prevents you sometimes from entering customized dates….turn off new features by going to edit preferences and deselecting both options….you will then be able to input customized dates.

@BarbGB At the time of the post we were halfway through December. When gathering the Actuals it uses the "last 12 months" (to the day). So, if you had done this on December 15, 2023, it would have included December 16, 2022, to December 15, 2023. Note that I'm talking Actuals, not budget, the only way it wouldn't have picked up those is if you didn't have any transactions in December 16 through 31, 2022.

I'm not sure on that, but I do believe that if you add them in, it will calculate the budget for them.

Anyone figured out how to create an automatic and accurate budget for the following year without a lot of manual manipulation?

I manually added the missing categories. Now I need to manually add in budget amounts. I don't see an option to automatically update a budget once it's been created.

And now that I'm looking at line item amounts, I find that many categories, e.g., auto insurance in the month of May, put an amount in every month (a 12 month average) that totals the one time annual amount.

This is more painful than doing taxes. I've used Quicken and the budget process for many years and it doesn't get much better. I don't really stick to a budget, as an ex-data analyst I use it for comparison.

Here is a new thread that talks about this problem "after someone has been caught" by the lack of these options when opening a budget in a new year:

@mschuler brand new to Quicken Canada and basically the Quicken US data isn't useful then what I would suggest is creating a new data file that doesn't include that US data that might throw things off.

Also, since you don't have any real past data, you are really going to have to setup everything in the budget as a clean slate. With a brand-new data file, that will be exactly what you will get when you create a new budget.