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    Created a new Budget for 2017. Whilst populating budget fields, I noticed that there is a greyed out field called "unallocated". When I review the Budget, It shows columns for Budget, Actual and Difference. However, in the Budget column I get amounts under unallocated. I am not sure what these are and how to get rid of them. Any ideas please?

    Friday, April 14, 2017 6:01 PM

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    The unallocated amount shows the amount remaining that you haven't assigned to subcategories from your "planned amount."  Select one of the major groups, for example "Income," and click the "Change planned amount" button.  That's where you can set how much you want to spend on that major category (or how much income you have.)  Then you split that up among your subcategories to reduce the unallocated amount to zero.  Hope that makes sense.  The attached pictures may help.

    • Proposed as answer by Bill Becker Friday, April 28, 2017 12:36 AM
    • Marked as answer by finwizzard Friday, April 28, 2017 6:04 AM
    Tuesday, April 18, 2017 3:51 PM

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    The unallocated amount shows the amount remaining that you haven't assigned to subcategories from your "planned amount."  Select one of the major groups, for example "Income," and click the "Change planned amount" button.  That's where you can set how much you want to spend on that major category (or how much income you have.)  Then you split that up among your subcategories to reduce the unallocated amount to zero.  Hope that makes sense.  The attached pictures may help.

    • Proposed as answer by Bill Becker Friday, April 28, 2017 12:36 AM
    • Marked as answer by finwizzard Friday, April 28, 2017 6:04 AM
    Tuesday, April 18, 2017 3:51 PM
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    Thanks a lot for the response. I played" around with this and have settled on zero planned amount. This way I do not have any unallocated amount and then I can individually add amounts for each category for the year. Hopefully this should work! This way I find that I can increase / decrease the budget for each category without the unallocated amount staying there in the budget. BTW I am only doing this for expenses and not income.
    Tuesday, April 18, 2017 4:01 PM
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    I never used Money budgeting for real, and it has been a long time since I experimented. I remember being startled/shocked that a budget would contain a target amount. I had always consider a budget to be a limit amount. I guess the government tends to follow the target amount, and may be many businesses do too.

    For a personal budget, if I budget an amount for entertainment, and I am falling short for the month, would I want to pick an expensive show to get to my budgeted amount?  If I have budgeted an amount for medical, would I not be happy that I did not meet my budgeted number? To me, I would think that a budget should try to keep me from spending more than allocated for, rather than setting a number as a target to be achieved.

    I have not seen it discussed for a while, but Money starting in 2005 has two kinds of budget. There is the essentials and the advanced budget. I am not able to tell from the discussions which type of budget is being used.

    Monday, April 24, 2017 4:38 PM
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    I use the Advanced budget. I use MS Money to "plan" a budget and then export it to Excel and "play" with the numbers to suit my need.  
    Monday, April 24, 2017 5:29 PM
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    In the selection dropdown of the desired period to view the budget (Change Time Period) , I want to be able to see values for future months. For example: when selecting the July option it shows me the values occurred in July 2017, and I want to see the July / 2018 values. As we are in May, "next month" displays June, not July. Help!
    Friday, May 25, 2018 8:58 PM