Transfers and budget reports

You probably have more control over what appears in the Budget report than just about any other Quicken report. One area to get very familiar with is the Advanced tab of the report Customize dialog.

One way to get both halves of a transfer to appear in the budget report even when only one half has a budget, is to select "Include All" in the "Categories" box on that Advanced tab ... without having excluded either of the transfer categories on the Category tab in the Customize dialog.

If you don't want any non-budgeted categories, select "Budgeted Only" in the Categories box; though a safer choice might be "Non-zero Actual/Budgeted" for those situations where you spend something in a non-budgeted category and don't want to miss seeing it in the report.

Thanks John,

I did some more playing around with it based on what you said. I have the following setup.

In the budget I select TO IRA as a category and assign $100 to it.

In the budget report I have the following:

Accounts Tab: Only my checking account is selected (This is the account I pay all of my bills out of) Advanced Tab: Transfers:Exclude internal, Categories: Budgeted only.

With this setup, I still get the FROM IRA showing up in the Inflows.

The weird part is if I change the Categories to non-Zero actual/budgeted the FROM IRA goes away. Unfortunately, I then get stuff I don't necessarily want like dividend income from investment accounts etc. I guess I could exclude the unwanted entries on the categories tab, but it seems like it should work with "budgeted only" selected.

I also tried this with different types of accounts just to make sure that wasn't the problem. They all seem to put the FROM Account in the Inflows.

Any Ideas?

Thanks Randall

You "select" TO IRA in the "Choose categories" dialog by putting a check mark beside it?

And you do not have a check mark beside FROM IRA in that same "Choose categories" dialog? If you do, FROM IRA is a "budgeted" category, even if you have not specified a non-zero amount for its budget.

Probably not related but: "Exclude internal" transfers does not work in Q2006 (or Q2004) as it did in other versions; it only excludes transfers "within" the same account (like Opening Balance transactions).

See my question earlier.

I looked at this some more. I am only using Q2006 in test mode, while Q2005 is my current version (and Q2005 gets it right for me). My original Q2006 data was converted from then current Q2005 data, but now the file contains a lot of test stuff, so there may be some problems in my tests.

But I do see some whacky results in the Budget report.

I "organize" my budget by "Category Groups" so I don't get quite the same results as you. One whacky result I get has to do with the category "groups", which I use for my budget. There is one entire category group that is simply missing from my Budget report despite the fact that it has budgeted categories and categories with actual amounts, all accounts and all categories are selected, as are all transfers.

I do see the inexplicable change in results when switching from "Budgeted only" to "Non-zero Actual/Budgeted". And I also see FROM AccountX when it should not appear.

Bottom line; I don't have any good news. I do think you can remove the unwanted halves of transfers using the Category tab ... this is also how you have to remove "Internal Transfers" from reports in Q2004 and Q2006.