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Ebills not working for Netflix, Apple, Amazon Prime & Spectrum - others fine, how to

MsTex19

Quicken help was no good on this subject. I tried Netflix and they thought Quicken was a streaming app??? Anyway, I want to put ALL my bills in ebiller no matter that I pay myself or they are auto deducted as I need to make a budget. I am new to Quicken for Mac so I assume I have to put in all my bills thru E-billing so I can set up budget - or maybe not? If I can never get these to sync after I try each company to see if anyone even knows what Quicken is maybe I should set them up all as Manual and put in the amount as they are all the same amount every month? If anyone has any ideas on what to do, greatly appreciated.

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Jon

In order to use E billing you need to either be paying for a Premier subscription to use Quicken's bill pay service, or your bank has to support Direct Connect with Bill Pay (which few banks do). Without E billing, you can still set up scheduled payments on the Bills & Income tab but you'll have to manage them yourself.

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Jon

jacobs

I am new to Quicken for Mac so I assume I have to put in all my bills thru E-billing so I can set up budget - or maybe not?

Definitely not! 😀 You can, and most people do, set up a budget in Quicken Mac without having all their bills as e-bills. You can create Scheduled Transactions (sometimes referred to as Reminders) for any recurring bills on whatever schedule you need (monthly on the 15th, quarterly on the second Tuesday, annually on the first Monday, etc.). As the dates come up and the bills are actually paid, you just click the Paid button in Quicken, or if you download your bank transactions and Quicken can auto-match a downloaded transaction with a schedule one in Quicken, you don't have to do anything.

BUT… none of that is relevant to setting up a budget in Quicken Mac! That's because Scheduled transactions don't appear in the budget; only actual (posted) transactions show up as actual income/expenses to compare the whatever budget amounts you have entered. You probably wouldn't want your budgeted amount to change every time you entered a scheduled future transaction — the software couldn't know if this is a new expense to add to the already-budgeted expense, or is accounting for the already-budgeted amount.

So, for creating a budget in Quicken Mac, you have to enter your projected income and expenses in the categories you want to track in your budget. then the budget will compare your projections against actual income and expenses as the year goes along. This gets easier in future years, because you can tell Quicken to create next year's budget as either a copy of the current year's budget or using the current year's actual as next year's budget numbers, and then tweak things however you want.

It takes some time to create a budget initially, but don't let it overwhelm you. You may want to start with the categories that account for most of your income and expenses and ignore, at least for the start, categories which have a small impact. It also depends on what you want together from your budget. For instance are you interested in the bottom line of all income and expenses? Then you need to budget and track all income and expenses. But some people budget for only what they consider their discretionary spending, to make sure they're staying in line in those categories, without building a complete budget for everything.

MsTex19

Wow @jacobs I'm now even more overwhelmed, but in a good way. I am wondering if I bit off more than I can chew with Quicken. I need to create a monthly (actually bi-weekly) budget. I put all the bills I could in Bills and Income. I was only trying to connect them with the bank or biller just to get the new amount to auto enter. Every month a credit card will be a different amount for instance so for budgeting I thought that would be wise. Now all the four who won't connect are the same amount monthly thankfully. I saw where I can mark "paid". I also daily auto update everything to sync that is. I am used to Mint, then again very loosely with budgeting. I created a spreadsheet as I have to see what has to be paid on one paycheck and then what the next paycheck (or what I can stretch). I guess I can enter those four that won't sync as Manual as I did my exterminator, etc. and then at least all are in the Billing and Income section. Now will have to read up about how to do a budget - ugh! I tried finding easy to follow videos on YouTube but they are all for Windows. Do you know where to find videos of all this stuff on a Mac?

Thanks to all of you who answered so much!

MsTex19

@Jon thanks - I maybe misspoke in that I wanted EBiller not to send bills or anything, I do that myself except on a few I am forced to set on auto pay. I don't like auto pay generally. I thought again that I had to put them all in Bills & Income and connect to the institutions so they'd all pull up the most recent bills so that could help in the budgeting process. Who knows about budgeting I feel overwhelmed. I can just add those four that won't sync as manual anyway as 3 are auto pay and amounts don't change and Spectrum is same monthly, but not autopay. Thanks.

jacobs

I just did a little searching and found this short video from Quicken Support. It's showing a version of Quicken Mac that's a few years old, but the budget features have barely changed since this version, so the video is accurate. It's a good start on how to construct a budget in Quicken Mac:

https://www.quicken.com/content/quicken-mac-creating-and-editing-budget

I'd also encourage you to look at the information in Quicken Help for budgets. Click on Help > Quicken Help, and when the browser window opens, click on Budgets in the left column, and then About Quicken Budgets. Read through each of the pages — it's actually pretty helpful and full of useful information. (Some areas of online help are very basic, but this section is done pretty well.)

As the guy on the video says, it looks a little daunting when you create and click on Edit in a budget. So it may help to click categories and eliminate those you don't use, or any you don't need to include in your budget. Then start building your budget. Pick the first expense category. Decide if there's a fixed amount you want to budget every month, or an amount every quarter, or once a year. If you have any reports from Mint of your actual spending last year, use those as a basis for your budget for this year. When you click in a cell for January and type a value, a pop-up menu appears which lets you do things like copy that amount to all 12 months, or at various intervals. For instance, if you know you want to budget $50 a week for groceries, type 50 and then select to Fill Forward with the "50 per week" option, and Quicken will calculate that that's 216.67 per month, and fill that in every month. Once you play around with it a little, I think you'll see it's pretty easy to set up a budget. The hard part, of course, is figuring out what your budget should be! After you fill out all your income and expenses, you may discover your budget shows you're spending too much, so you can go back to the drawing board and find categories to reduce your budget until you get it where you want it.

I hope that helps!

MsTex19

@Jacob thank you SO much for your incredible details to help this newbie along! I've taught myself every software I've ever learned from the beginning of computers until now, so I am not going to let Quicken get the best of me. You obviously are well versed in all of this and the best is reading instructions and watching videos instead of my usual just jump in and try to figure it out! Thanks again!!!