How do I set up budget carry foward. (Q Mac) (2024)

November 2023

November 2023

@Jon said: What you're describing is envelope budgeting, Quicken Mac doesn't do that. You'll have to make the adjustments by hand each month.

@Jon Is this envelope budgeting or budget rollover? Or do you consider them the same thing? To me, what @JJN003 describes is what I've thought of as rollover: the difference, positive or negative, between actual and budget each month gets rolled forward into the next month's budget. Whereas envelope budgeting is budgeting to set aside money each month for a future vacation, savings, or other expense — e.g. I'm saving for a new refrigerator which will cost $1,200, and I want $100 of my expense budget each month to go into a virtual savings account for the refrigerator so I will have th money set aside for it after a year. To me, rollover is based on actual versus budget variations, while envelope budgeting allows funds in a checking or savings account to be earmarked for future expenses. Maybe these are just two different applications of the same basic functionality?

I will note that based on user requests, the Quicken Mac development team has recently marked the Idea topic (feature request) for envelope budgeting as "Planned". As with all future features, we don't know when such functionality will arrive, only that it is now on their schedule. There are a number of budget-related Idea topics which the developers have recently marked as planned, which indicates that they pan to revamp/re-code the budget portion of the program in the next year.

But the idea topic for budget rollover remains marked as "Under Consideration".

The doesn't necessarily mean one will be done and the other won't, or that one will be done separately and earlier than the other; the status of various Idea requests, especially when overlapping, can be imprecise.

November 2023

@jacobs Envelope budgeting is where you take your money & divide it up among different spending categories, and you can only spend what's allocated to each category. The classic way of doing that was literally putting cash into envelopes for Food, Rent, Utilities, etc. There was no going over budget because when an envelope was empty you either stopped spending money on that category or you moved money from another envelope (rebudgeted). Rollover is part of that since any money left over in the envelope at the end of the month was still there the next month, but I suppose you could do rollover without doing the hard spending limits.

Setting aside money each month for a specific one-time goal like a new refrigerator is what I would call savings goals. You could do that with envelope budgeting but it could be a separate feature as well.

When typing up my previous reply I went looking for an envelope budgeting suggestion that OP could vote for & was a bit surprised I couldn't find one; I didn't think to look in the Reporting or Printing sections.

November 2023

Chris_QPW Member ✭✭✭✭

November 2023

The original request isn't envelop budgeting, it is budget rollover.

Just for reference, Quicken Windows has support for budget rollover, but not envelop budgeting.

Note that it doesn't see very clear in the original post, but the rollover is per category (optional).

Mostly this is used for the situation where you know that you spend on average a certain amount, but not exactly which months it will be spent in. Another situation might be where the person is "saving up" to pay for a bill in the future.

Note that the two aren't mutually exclusive.

If I'm looking at the budget like this:

Rollover transfers excesses to the next month (One example is my gifts with the green arrows). I will now turn off the rollover:

The -35 now no longer affects the February budget.

Whereas envelop budgeting would allow for transferring between the categories in the same month. For instance, if it was available, I could transfer some of the "excess budget" amount in Auto:Insurance to Gifts.

I have seen people describe using Savings Goals to do envelop budgeting, but it seemed really complicated. And note that using Savings Goals would be outside of the normal Quicken budget. Savings Goals are basically accounts, and of course the budgets are categories. So, they don't "interact" other than one can filter by accounts.

Beside the need for a feature to transfer budget amounts between categories it seems like you would also need something that makes sure that the overall total doesn't exceed some amount. I guess you could just look at the total, but it might be better to have an entry that force it.

BTW as you can imagine envelop budgeting has been requested many times for Quicken Windows, but as of now they haven't done it. But as a sideline observer (I don't really use any of this) I wonder if they can pull something like that off without messing it up. The current Windows budget is extremely complicated with all the different features it has and has been known to have a lot of weird bugs.

I will also note that the budget is synced with the Cloud dataset. And I just check Quicken Web supports rollovers.

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November 2023

Thanks for the view from the Quicken Windows side, @Chris_QPW.

From your explanation, envelope budgeting would be a superset of the existing rollover budgeting. Or conversely, the existing rollover budgeting is a subset of full-fledged envelope budgeting. If that's the terminology everyone uses, that makes sense to me.

What doesn't make sense, then, is why on the Quicken Mac side, the Idea for envelope budgeting has recently been marked as "Planned", while the Idea for budget rollover (which has many more votes) remains "Under Consideration". Why would they implement the broader request for envelope budgeting but not the one for rollover, which seems to be a subset? Either the status reviews of the feature requests aren't correct, or we're not all using the same terminology.

Chris_QPW Member ✭✭✭✭

November 2023

No, I guess I didn't explain it clear enough. They are separate concepts, but one might argue that someone might want both.

Basically, the rollover transfers horizontally (next month). And Envelop budgeting transfers vertically category to category.

It is also puzzling to me that they have marked envelop budgeting as planned, and not rollovers. I would have thought that they would do rollovers first (or at the same time) for no other reason than it has been requested more than envelop budgeting and it is already supported in Quicken Web.

In fact, I might argue that rollover is easier to implement on the GUI side of it. You simply have to add the arrows indicating that you want to transfer from one month to another for that category (BTW there are two indicator one for transferring both the positive and the negative, and the other only transferring the positive balances)

So, this is sort set and forget as far as the user goes.

But the user wouldn't want Quicken to automatically transfer a given categories budget to another category. So, one would have to work up a GUI that allows the user to go in and specify to transfer some or all of the remaining budget from one category to another. At least that is the way I understand the envelop system, in that you want to be making that decision as you have a shortfall in a given category, not just move it around automatically. After all, if that was the case the most "automatic" system would be simply to have a budget that says I have X income, and my Y expenses shouldn't exceed that.

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November 2023

Austin@ Mac Beta Beta

November 2023