Hi Quickeners!
Finally, after 40 years, I have started living under a budget. So far, so good and quicken is a great help in tracking how I spend (or overspend). Each week I run a report on my budget vs spending. This gives me a good idea of where I am at and to make adjustments as I go along in the month.
Some expense items like groceries, entertainment, dining etc. have a monthly budget amount and of course, when I run the report it gives me a Weekly budget amount. If my budget for groceries is $800 per month then on my weekly budget report tells me I have $200 to spend on groceries. This is the way I want it, if I spend $220 then the report warns me that I am $20 over. I call these 'variable expense' items because the amount drawn down from the budget varies from day to day.
Then there are 'fixed expenses' however, like Rent, Phone and utilities which also have a monthly budget amount. But these expense items are paid all at once when the bill becomes due. They are monthly but not weekly expense items. If my rent is $1000, I don't have a budget of $250 per week for rent. My phone bill is paid once a month, not four times a month.
But I have a little problem. When I run the budget report the fixed expense items for the week are out of whack. Say I pay my rent today. When I run the report for this week, it tells me that my budget for Rent is $250 and I have overspent by $750. This is not the case, there is no weekly budget for Rent. I pay it once a month not 4 times a month. When it is paid, it should go to 0 or whatevr was paid against it. But I still need to see it in my report to see what I paid and what I didn't for fixed items. Things like groceries , of course, report normally because it is perfectly okay to split the monthly budget into weeks.
This makes the report hard to read and use or deem reliable. So now I use excel to create my budget report where the report is in two parts giving a fixed and variable expense budget comparison. All the variable items get a monthly budget amount/4 for a weekly tabulation . All fixed just state the monthly amount, not Rent/4.. That way I can total variable item spending and total fixed amount spending and arrive at two figures. This tells me how much I spent/overspenton variable items and how much of my fixed expense items were paid for so far and how much do I have to pay in fixed items total for the rest of the month. This works but I spend up to an hour each week entering in figures from my expense reports.
Is there a way I can create a similar report in Quicken? It is important that budget activities like reporting are as simple as possible so i actually do it.
Side question: Quicken has a feature from reports 'Export to Excel'. However it actually exports it as a .txt which has to be imported into excel. Is there an easier way to do this as in, is there a real .csv or .xls export?
Your thoughts....