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- Click on the Budgets tab on the feature bar.
- You will see a Getting Started view that briefly introduces some budgeting features. You can click through these images by clicking the arrow buttons. When you’re ready, click Start Budgeting.
- Next, Quicken will scan your existing transactions to automatically create a default budget based on your past income and expense history. The rules for what shows in your budget are:
- Transactions from the last 12 months are scanned (older transactions are ignored).
- Any categories that were used in the last 12 months are included by default (you can change this later).
- The actual income/expense values from the past 12 months become your default budget values for the 12 months included in the budget (you can change these values at any time).
Examples:- If you had a single transaction for $75 each month in a category called “Phone Bill”, Quicken sets a $75 budget for this category for each month.
- If you had a $1,000 transaction categorized as “Property Tax” in April of of last year and a $1,200 transaction categorized as “Property Tax” in September of last year, Quicken sets a $1,000 budget for Property Tax for April, a $1,200 budget for Property Tax in September and a $0 budget for Property tax for all other months.
- If you have an expense category like “Shopping” that varies greatly from month-to-month, the default values you see in your budget for “Shopping” are the actual values for transactions categorized as “Shopping” in the previous year—and thus will vary from month-to-month
- After Quicken completes the analysis (this could take a little time for large data files), you will see your default budget based on your historical spending patterns.
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We suggest that you revisit your budget at least monthly to see how you are progressing towards your goals and to make adjustments where needed.
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