Community Discussion: Report to compare two budgets?

Allow me to correct that last sentence.

In my testing, I used a budget for only a couple of categories, which allowed Excel to display both budget years fully visible on the screen at the same time.

For those who have budgets with many categories, it will be anywhere from unlikely to impossible to see all the entries for both budget years (or sometimes, for even one budget year) at the same time.

My Excel skills are fairly limited, but I think Excel can still be employed for the original poster's purpose. I will leave it to those with more refined Excel skills to address the details to achieve the desired end.

Sure there is.

Current Budget Custom Dates - pick a span of several years Interval - year

Well, it's true, you can see multiple budgets in Quicken budget reports.

But the Quicken budget reports don't compare budgets to one another; they compare actuals to budgets. And I believe it's likely a user would want to see their budget comparisons by month (which is the common period used for budgeting); budget reports with an interval of "Month" would have one year's values totally off screen, making even visual comparisons difficult.

In Excel, one can see and compare only budget amounts (with no actual amounts to distract and waste space), and the two budgets can appear one below the other (with the same months aligned in the same column), rather than one appended horizontally to the other as in the Quicken budget reports.

I believe that a user could utilize Excel's capabilities to compute the $amount differences between two budgets imported from Quicken.

Yes, but dumping what I have suggested is a much better starting point.

I'm not convinced of that.

And I'm basing my opinion significantly on how the process would impact the desire in original post the Quicken Community.

Further: A case can be made that a Quicken user taking the, apparent, starting approach of the original poster in the Quicken Community could not use your approach at all. As I noted in my original post in this discussion, it appears the op in the Community is creating a "new" budget for the new year (that used to be the only way to budget for a new year - there was no way to extend a budget to subsequent years)... NOT extending an existing budget to the new year. Quicken has no ability to utilize two different budgets in the same report.

But it will be those who feel they have a need for the process who will ultimately be the judge of the best approach (I'm not one of those people).

What would really be beneficial to this issue would be someone taking the Excel ball and running with it - then posting here how to have Excel do more/most of the work.

I don't use Q budgets, but it looks like a user can create a budget for every year, then run a report as I suggested.

I did dump the report to excel, deleted columns for actual and difference numbers, and then did y/y comparison calculations easy peasy.

If he is creating a NEW budget for each year, he is already doing things the hard way. But I do not interpret his comment to really mean what you are suggesting he has said. But it is anybody's guess.

Just use the same budget, but update it each year. That budget will then have each year to look at.

Either way, you can dump to excel and manipulate it easy enough (unless you change your budget around every month!). But if one really creates NEW budgets, they will have to make sure the categories match, or there will be hell to pay during the excel phase.

I don't use budgets - I just make sure I spend less than I take in. LOL.