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Subject Author Date
Budget reports: mixing apples and oranges Colm 06-26-2006
Posted by Colm on June 26, 2006, 9:58 am
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 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....


Posted by John Pollard on June 26, 2006, 10:14 am
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< snip >

> 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.

> snip >

> 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.

No way I know of.

> 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?

Copy the report to the Windows clipboard; paste the report into
Excel.

You don't say what version of Quicken you're using. In Q2004,
there's a "Copy" menu item at the top of the report; in Q2005
and Q2005, there is an "Export Data" menu item which contains a
choice to "Copy to Clipboard" option.

--

John Pollard
First initial underscore Last name at mchsi dot com
Please reply to newsgroup




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