It would be very helpful on the Budget screen if Quicken provided a year-to-date (YTD) total for each budget category versus the YTD actual for each category. Also to provide a total year amount at the far right. The YTD information is critical to understanding how you are doing at any point during the year against your budget. Some months you can be over budget and some under but how am I doing on a cumulative basis YTD? It seems the only current solution is to export all the data and try to create a YTD analysis but the exported format does not easily lend itself to such an analysis.
Is there something similar available in your Quicken Mac? This rather hidden option setting is available in the Quicken for Windows software:
@John D. 777 If I understand correctly what you're asking for, it already exists in Quicken Mac — it's just a little hidden.
In your budget screen, is the second column January?
If so, click the "< <" icon to add the additional comparison columns:
If this new column shows January to December, as show above, then click on the little "v" icon to change from "Entire Budget Year Totals" to "Budget Year-to-Date Totals":
The result is a column showing year-to-date, January through May, showing actual compared to budgeted, and the difference:
That's the good news.
The bad news is that the developers haven't implemented a way to control when the year-to-date comparison is through. In a few days, when the calendar flips to June 1, the budget will be showing January to June — which isn't helpful because it will be comparing six months of the budget to 5 months plus one day of actual. What we need is the ability to set an "As of" date similar to the investment Portfolio screen; so whether it's June 1 or June 17, we could see January through May actual-versus-budget. We need this on-screen, and in a printed budget report, as detailed in this existing Idea thread:
And this has good news and bad news as well: the good news part of this is that the developers have marked the Idea thread (feature request) for this functionality as "Planned"; the bad news is that it has been showing as "Planned" for well over a year, and they don't provide any clue as to when this feature will finally appear.
Thank you UKR but I don't see that screen in Quicken for Mac.
Thanks that's very helpful jacobs! That is a real problem that it doesn't allow for YTD comparison at month-end unless you review on the last day of the month. I hope it moves past "planned" soon.
