Budgeting using Savings Goal Accounts

At the bottom the the budget window, you'll find the "Choose Categories" button. Click it. You can then deselect all the transfer accounts & categories you *don't* want to show in your budget.

Regards,

Margaret

The transfers causing the problem are to/from other accounts, such as a Credit Card account. Those transfers are unchecked, but they still show up in the Budget Report. I tried checking and then unchecking them and there was no effect in the Budget Report.. they were there no matter if checked or unchecked. I can't exclude the whole account from my Budget, because that's where most of the monthly charges appear.

Say I've got a $100 VISA charge which I categorize as Household. I pay the VISA bill with a check, and it shows as a paired transfer, out of the checking account and into the VISA account. Both of those show up in the Budget Report, even though neither is checked in the Show Categories list. The more I think about it, the more I conclude that there is simply no way for Quicken to do what I want him to.

Any other ideas??? Thanks again ==> Dick

There are several ways to control the categories that appear in the Budget report.

First, you probably have told the Budget report to print "Non zero actuals and Budgeted categories"; I think that is a fairly common choice since you don't want to be surprised that you are out of budget but did not notice because you spent money in a category that you did not budget for. But if you are comfortable that you don't care about any actual expenditures for categories not in your budget, you can tell the Budget report to print only "Budgeted categories". (This is controlled on the Advanced tab in the Customize dialog for the Budget report).

You can also control which transfers appear in the Budget by using telling Quicken to exclude "Internal transfers"; those used to be transfers where both sides of the transfer are otherwise eligible for the report. Q2004 does not follow the normal logic for this option, and I think someone has mentioned another newer version which has a problem with this option too; can't remember at the moment. Normally the "Internal transfers" exclusion would prevent your Household/Visa transfers from appearing in your Budget report, but if you have Q2004 that won't work, and possibly not even in a later version either.

If you want to keep "Non zero actuals and Budgeted" categories in your Budget report, but you want to exclude a particular transfer category, you can do that on the Category tab in the Customize dialog for the Budget report. Every "transfer" category is shown at the end of the Category list on the Category tab and you can exclude groups of transfers based on the accounts they are transfers FROM/TO. You have to coordinate your choices here with the choices you make in your Budget; that is, you have to choose which side of the transfer you want to see. Excluding transfers using the Category tab in a report is also a way around the "new" treatment of "Internal Transfers" introduced in Q2004. For your Household/Visa situation, for example, you can exclude both those "[account categories]" on the Category tab.

Finally, you can also control *where* transfer categories appear in the Budget report, by assigning different Category Groups to them. You could then have the FROM half of a transfer in one Category Group and the TO half of the transfer in a different Category Group.