Budgeting is here! The feature helps you set a budget for the categories you care about and makes it easy to do so by providing your monthly averages as a baseline.
Tell us how you're using the new budget feature, so we are able to customize it to your needs.
Where does it fall on a scale of "crazy simple" to "too tricky for me"?How many categories are you tracking? Did you pay attention to your monthly average to set your numbers? How frequently will you log back in to check how you're doing? Let us know.
Quicken Kathryn
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I love the budgeting feature, however I find it does not work very well for many things that I do not purchase on a regular basis. For example, I usually travel 2-3 times per year. Tracking these expenses on a monthly basis is basically useless. It will show zero for every month and then on a month I travel would be four times larger than my budget. There are countless other examples, like electronics, media (which I often wait to go onsale so purchase only a few times a year), etc ect.
Simply letting the user change the time scale from a month to, let's say, a year, would make the budget feature shine. Making it a custom time scale would be even better, fixing the problems of those trying to balance a mid-month paycheck.
Just started Quicken today. Like it except the Budget feature. It runs very slowly and crashes Internet Explorer. Also the scroll bars and super annoying. Is there anyway to correct this? I notice others have written the same thing and I don't see an adequate response.
Thanks
Hi - I've tried using the budgeting feature, here's some feedback:
1. Too slow if you have more than 10 categories. I need to budget for about 20 categories.
2. I need to set a budget up for the whole year ahead by month. Right now as I understand it, I can only set up categories for the current month. For example the budget for gas in July and August is different because of increased travel. Schools/Sports is increased in Sept/Oct and Apr/May. Etc.
3. I need to see a page that has my budget vs. actuals performance for the whole year, in addition to monthly.
the budgeter is useless if it won't allow you to track all the categories you need to budget for. i appreciate how easy it is to use, and that it automatically adjusts category goals. icould probably make it work if i had more categories allowed.
it just seems like it needs more work and ability to actually budget, not just tell you what you spent last month. vacation, car tune up, insurance expenses come up every six months or yearly. so since i haven't 'technically' spent anything on those items yet (created monthly averages), i have no way of budgeting for them. i could technically rig the system and create a bunch of savings categories that i 'pay into' each month, but again, no way to track them because i am only allowed 10 categories!
Well, I noticed the budget thingy about two weeks ago. Excitedly, I went in there and made a bunch of adjustments to the categories and amounts that I want to watch. When I 'saved' it, the screen went blank and I have never been able to see anything but a blank screen again. I have tried several different browsers and operating systems to no avail. I created a support case, which has been elevated today to a higher level of support.
Has anyone else had this issue?
I wanted to take some time to follow up to your questions. Mint.com has really stepped their game up, and I would like to see you guys do well. Why should I stay with you guys for $36 a year, when I get a more attractive interface and stuff elsewhere. That being said, I have been loyal to Quicken OLine cause I have my information aggregated with you guys, and enjoy seeing my metrics YTD etc. How are you going to compete? How are you going to edge yourself? I have an account compiling over at Mint.com awaiting enough information to make it attractive to switch. There is no joy in overpaying, but if you guys can distinguish yourselves, I might make it worth $3. Here are my responses to your questions.
Where does it fall on a scale of "crazy simple" to "too tricky for me"?
--There is a basic feature on IE or any browser called a scrollbar. Having a scrollbar within a internet window is a user interface killer. Please remove that! My #1 complaint by far!
--I love the simple interface. Make the boxes smaller and re-arrangable. Similar to other people's requests.
--Why would I use this or any budget? To make decisions. The budget feature currently is a good data resource, but not a good INFORMATION resource. The key feature/killer app that you guys have is the aggregation of our financial data. "Management" of companies / researchers need aggregation of data to make decisions, if I need to rely on my budget, I need you guys to compile the data for me in such a manner to direct me to make a healthy decision.
--Input my budget data once, watch it work! Make it easy to create a budget! Walk us through. Talk to the TurboTax guys!
Aesthetic changes are needed:
1. Color changing as your budget comes close to your limit. A red when you are down to your last penny would be visually concerning.
2. Smaller Boxes
3. No scroll bar
4. Graphs / YTD Analysis / Simple Pie Charts / Total Budget Chart
How many categories are you tracking?
--I would think most people would like to track all of them. Most important ones obviously are people's variable costs.
Did you pay attention to your monthly average to set your numbers?
--Yes. This is a nice feature to get started.
How frequently will you log back in to check how you're doing?
--2x a month. Thus having an alert email would be great.
Since my husband and I get paid on a bi-weekly basis, we keep a bi-weekly budget versus a monthly budget. The option to have a bi-weekly budget versus a monthly budget feature would help us greatly. Any plans to add that feature?
How can one budget with just expenses? Half of the picture is missing here,what about income? Maybe I'm missing something. Help me figure out how I can plan my expenses without planning my income. please...
I was really excited to try Quicken Online again, but this time for free! I have used Quicken many times in the past and had also purchased a subscription for Quicken online about this year.
I believe this budgeting feature should be part of the Track Spending feature. It does not not help me budget whatsoever. I usually prepare my budget using Excel, but not so good at the charts and graphs.
It would be great to also have some more planning tools and calculators. Income projections and recurring expenses for short term and long term goals will be useful as well.
The budgeting feature actually isn't that useful. I have maybe a dozen categories.
The widget is slow to load, and hard to see where the money is at for the categories.
There are 2 scroll bars in my browser now, instead of just one.
All in all, mint.com does the budget feature better.
Quicken's budget feature looks like a committee designed the interface. There are like 3 different sliders, text boxes, etc. Its clunky, slow, and vaguely confusing.
On the other hand, the idea is right on track. I just want to track where I'm at, so if it weren't so clunky and slow, it'd be very useful.
About the only improvement I could ask for would be something akin to envelope based budgeting, so I can carry over extra funding in budget categories for the next month. (Helps out with, say, christmas gifts and things that are irregular.)
Please add the ability to download budgeting items and categories to a CSV file like you do with transactions. I use this with a budgeting spreadsheet to manage and forecast my budgets.
I wonder if you guys really understand how important this product is? It is much more than just one more product offering.
I would really like to be able to re-order the listing of categories, such as put my Rent on top and then utilities etc... I'm not understanding the order things are in...they aren't even alphabetized?? Thanks!
More categories! It's easy to use, but I find it fairly useless if I can't see all of my categories at one time. I've never had the crashing problem that other users refer to, but I don't understand why I couldn't set a goal for all of my categories instead of just a few priority ones? I care about all of them and even if I'm not watching "groceries" as closely as I'm watching "auto/gas"... that doesn't mean that I don't need to see that info on the screen too! I check in almost everyday and this is really frustrating. Otherwise, you've got a good thing going here.
I'm really enjoying the online application. The budget feature is nice, but takes a while to load. Although I can add as many categories as I want, they take up a bit of real estate requiring quite a bit of scrolling (scroll within a scroll). I also haven't seen any way to sort the categories. They tend to be sorted in the order that the category was added. I'd like the ability to put my categories that I need to watch closer at the top (more dynamic categories), and the more static categories (i.e. fixed monthly costs) at the bottom, so that I can still keep an eye on them periodically to make sure nothing got mis-categorized. It's a good start - looking forward to seeing the progress.
I think the budgeting tool is a good addition. I think the following would be helpful changes
1) Allow more than 8 categories to be tracked
2) Allow previous months to be edited. I'm new to using this feature, and i want to add categories to previous months
Ok - about the 8 category limit - in firefox the scrollbar on the page is not visible. It does work in Internet Explorer. Please get rid of that scroll bar!
Really like the budgeting feature a lot. For it to really work me, though, I need it to have an annual feature so I can plan for large one time expenses. Also, when I set it up, I could see more categories than I can now -- I'll try IE to see if that works better than Firefox. To answer your questions:
I think it is "crazy simple" which I appreciate.
I am tracking about 20 categories (which I hope I can see in IE)
I found the monthly average to be very useful. Not perfect, but it gives you a good starting point
I will check in on a weekly basis
Our budget doesn't start on the first of the month. It starts on the 4th wednesday of every month. The other tabs allow me to custom set the dates but the budget tab doesn't have that feature so the balances are not accurate. Am I missing something?
Overall, I haven't found this feature particularly useful
Many of my categories have irregular payments, so unless there is some history of underspending that can keep me from way overspending (like an envelope system), it looks like I completely blow a budget even when I don't really... The ability to track on a higher level than monthly might help.
Also, I would like to track most of if not all of my categories, and each category takes up too much vertical space for this to be effective.
Lastly, there are parts of my budget (namely rent) that I would like to track as part of the total Goal, but don't want to track individually. (I wouldn't mind tracking it individually except that it always looks like I'm ahead on my spending since I pay the whole amount on the first.)
One other feature I'd like...the ability to apply a specific transaction to a particular month's budget. For example, my mortgage payment sometimes clears on the last day of the month and sometimes on the first day of the next month. Also, some transactions from the last few days of the month don't clear until the next month starts. It would be nice to find a specific line item and assign it to the budget for October 2008, for example. I agree with others that it's too slow to load and the extra scrollbar inside the window is annoying.
This is new for me and I want to set up expense catigories for the coming year.
At present the catagories I have envisioned are Donations; Taxes; Rental Expenses; Grocery; Family gifting; Entertainment; Travel; Car expense; Medical Costs; Reimbusred Expenses; Other expenses.
started using quicken online in september and like the product. the budgeting feature has been both simple and tricky to follow.i'm glad the online updates allows for more categories to track.
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