Realistic Bar Graph of Income/Expenses

Dear Q-Think Tank Crew,

I love Quicken and have been a loyal customer for more than 30 years. Good Job!

But, as things normally are, there has always been a little thing that I think could be improved. So pardon me while I stuggle to explain what that is…..

I religiously use the "Budget Bar Graph" to track my spending. It has a lot of nice features and I appreciate it. As I am sure you are aware, the set-up shows each category having a specific amount of "monthly spending allowance" represented by a horizontal bar that fills in with green as spending accumulates throughout the month. If spending exceeds the budget the bar turns red. That part is excellent as it alerts me to check my spending and note where the overages have occured. This is great!!!

But I think the bar graph's set up is lacking one crucial feature—each of the bars show how much has been spent relative to how much has been budgeted. As such, each budget catagory's bar is shown to have the same lenghth showing only the amount budeted vs the amount spent. Thus each catagory appears (graphically) to have the same value relative both to each other and to the budget as a whole.

But those are two different values… I think it would be much more accurate and useful to dispay each catagory's bar length in proportion to its value in total budget. For example: currently when my $19.00 Entertainment budget is overspent (say, by $1), the bar turns red. The same thing happens when my $275 Utility budget is exceeded (say, by $100). These are obviously different amounts that have different weights, but graphically they are displayed as having the same weight (represented by the bar's length) as each other.

The result is that when my Entertainment and Utilities are both over budget they both look like the same red sore thumbs on the graph even though Utilities is much more importantly overspent (in total cost) relative to Entertainment by a factor 100:1.

If the expense bars were scaled (by length) to reflect their relative value to the total budget it would be much easier to assess my spending at a glance. Right now, toward the end of the month, it ends up skewed to red due to overspending in very low value catagories.

And, of course the opposite applies to the green of the spending. I know I can adjust the budget to get rid of the red, but the bars would still appear to represent equal values.

What say you?

Daniel