A budget lets you set monthly goals for how much you expect to spend (or earn) and then track your progress against that goal.
The 12-Month Budget allows you to set up a comprehensive, yearly plan. You can budget recurring income and expenses, seasonal variations, infrequent events like tax payments, or special events like Vacations or Holiday plans. On the budget setup view you can see your 12-month plan, including the net of your inflows and outflows per month, as well as cumulative yearly total.
Once your budget is in place, the budget view allows you to track your progress as the month progresses. Highlighting areas where you overspend (or spend less than expected) by month, drill down to see the actual spending in a particular category, or see see cumulative year-to-date total to see how you’re tracking across multiple months.
You can edit, change or update your budget at any time. You can also create multiple budgets to track different aspects of your financial life. For example, if you don’t need a comprehensive budget, you might want to create a budget just to track your various entertainment expenses, or just your work or small business income and expenses. Or, you might want to create separate budgets for different members of your family.
Quicken budgets are based on your categorized transactions. You create your budget by selecting the categories you’d like to track in your budget. Then, categorized income and expense transactions from all accounts will be included in your budget for that category. (Note: From investment accounts, only cash transactions for which you can apply a category are included.)
If you see a transaction that is impacting your budget and has been miscategorized, you can change the category in your account register.
Ignored Categories
A few “special” categories are always ignored by the budget and are not tracked: