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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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.
I like the interface and simplicity but have 4 main requests for budgeting.
1. Like many others I would like to be able to track my budget from one paydate to the next (25th in my case).
2. I would also like to be able to put things in the overall category (like mortgage payments) that I don't want to track by adding a category.
3. I need to be able to work with quarterly or bi-annual items.
4. Finally I like being able to see the detail of where I am spending in trends but would like to lump some items together into a custom budget category.
Yes... I've had a similar problem. It's awful. I loaded all the catergories I need to track and then Quicken just locked up completely. The only way out is to close Quicken altogehter. I can log back in and update as long as I don't click on the Goals tab. If I click on the Goals tab everything locks up and I must completely close Quicken to get out of it. This is NOT a budgeting feature at all. A budget should allow you to BUDGET for the things that you need. I'm thinking about upgrading to Quicken Deluxe but I don't know if it will provide a better BUDGET feature. If it doesn't have a true BUDGET feature then that would be a waste of money. So far I haven't got a clear answer to that question.
Wow! Has anyone noticed that the last response from a Quicken employee was in August?!?!? That is appalling. Why encourage feedback and then not respond. It seems as though many people have problem with it crashing and locking up if you add additional categories. I thought it might reset in January but it didn't. I have no way to undo the categories I added because every time I click on the Goals tab it locks up.
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?
Having zero-based budgeting, envelopes, would give Mamamanager the functionality she needs.
I'm just getting started. I like the simplicity however I can't seem to determine if it's using both of my checking accounts which I've added in determining the averages.
I would like to have the ability to have budget money carry over from month to month. For example, I allot a certain amount to auto maintenance every month say $30. I'm not going to spend that $30/month every month it's going to build up and I'll spend $65 on an oil change or $200 on repairs. Some categories just lend themselves to this kind of functionality versus a set amount of money every month. Entertainment is another example, if I don't spend my alloted money one month, I want to have that money available the following.
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