Creating a budget is one of the best things you can do in Quicken, helping you to get and maintain control of your finances. Creating a budget is, essentially, creating a plan for your money. You designate the amounts you plan to spend in individual categories that represent the areas you spend your money in. You can then track how you are doing with the budget, seeing your spending in individual categories and overall.
A slideshow presentation of the budget creation process is here. |
Quicken automatically creates a budget based on your recurring expense categories. After the budget is created, you can easily add or remove categories to more precisely match your needs.
Select the Planning tab.
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Budgets default to the current calendar year. If you want to apply the budget to previous years, use Advanced Budget Settings.
You can define a fiscal year that begins on any month of the year. When you do so, any yearly or quarterly preferences in Quicken are offset based on the first month of your fiscal year. For example, if your fiscal year started in April 2016, and it's now January 2017, select April in the Start budget on field. Quicken then considers April 1, 2015, to March 31, 2016, as last year. To base Quicken's yearly or quarterly budget options on January 1 to December 31, select January in the Start budget on field. |
The type of budget created
Quicken creates a budget for all of your recurring personal expense categories. It does not include transfers or income categories in the budget. If you want, you can add transfers and income categories later by clicking Select Categories to Budget at the bottom of the Budget window.
The accounts and categories used
Quicken creates the budget based on personal expense transactions in all of your accounts except Invoice and *Sales Tax* accounts (Quicken Home & Business only).
Quicken excludes the following categories from a budget when it is first created: Income categories Special investment and paycheck categories (usually preceded by an underscore character), such as "_401Contrib" The Interest Exp, Misc, and Not Sure categories Categories with the following tax line item assignments: Schedule A: Home mortgage interest, W-2: Federal tax withheld, W-2:Medicare tax withheld, W-2:Medicare tax withheld, W-2:Local tax withheld, W-2:Soc. Sec. tax withheld, and W-2:State tax withheld. After the budget has been created you can add categories and further customize it, as necessary. |
About extending your budgetThe first time you view a prior year's budget in a new year, Quicken asks you if you want to extend it to the new year. Just click OK and Quicken creates a new budget for you automatically, copying all of your current budget categories and budget values to the new budget. If you want to get an early startIf you want to create next year's budget before the start of the new year, or if you want more control over how the budget is created:
Notes
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