Sign in
Microsoft.com
 
Microsoft
 
 
 

locked
Can't get the Budget to work how I want it to. RRS feed

 > 

  • Question

  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote

    Using Money 2007.  Using the "Advanced Budget' as someone recommended to me.

    Here's a couple screenshots of my Budget screens:

    1 - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1787993/budget.jpg

    2 - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1787993/budget2.jpg

    I've created the heading I wanted (Auto Gas & Oil, Auto Insurance, etc).  I assigned categories from within money to go with each Budget heading.  What I WANT to do, is set each heading with an amount that I've budgeted to spend every month.  I then want money to look at the transactions I've entered and put them in the heading they fall under and total it up for me so I can see which categories I'm over spending and things like that.

    The problem is Money is putting values in the budget that I have no idea where it's getting them from.  If you look at shot 2, the Real Estate Taxes is putting in a Monthly charge of $1200.  I haven't paid any real estate taxes since March of 2010 so why would it be putting that in there as an expense?  I just can't figure out where it's getting the values from that it's putting in there and how I can make this work how I want.

    I don't want to have to put in a budget amount for each category, just for each heading and let money calculate it across the categories I've put in there.

    Does that all make sense?  Any suggestions?

    Saturday, January 1, 2011 3:07 PM

All replies

  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote

    The first thing to look at is all your scheduled bills--these get propagated into the budget directly and there is no way to stop it. If those scheduled items are not right, you are in trouble from the start.

    Second, Money sometimes does retarded stuff: one example is a scheduled item for monthly with a first due date ten years from now gets factored into the budget as a monthly expense now.

    To your specific requirements, Money will not let you just budget at your groups level. The groups make it look cute (I guess--to me they've always been pretty useless) but all Money adv. budgeting is done by Category and Subcategory.

    We could have very long threads on Budget in Money. Budgeting was always an Achillies Heel to Money: they spent a lot of effort of developers and designers who didn't really understand the problem at hand all that well trying to make it work for lots of users when most every user had some unique way they wanted to look at the problem, few of which aligned with either what Money was designed to do or sane financial practice. They kept adding "improvements" but they just made it worse. So then they added the Essential Budget and the S&S budget. You might also want to try those tools.

    Saturday, January 1, 2011 10:46 PM
    Moderator