Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Quicken and New Math

Below is a screen shot from a budget of mine:

(Yes, I stitched together two columns of screen shots to hide some of the other months, but trust me, this is what it really showed for July.)

My fixed expenses are -271, which is crazy - I assure you I spend money! The flexible expenses seem right. But the total (-271+2415=-424) is just insane. If I drill down into categories and sub-categories, I see similar nonsense.
As I recall, this happened last year about this time of the year, so it must be some goober in that column (July).

Here's another (non-edited) example:


In the last column, the total expenses for auto are $9, while clearly I'm spending more like $300. In the second column, you can see $0, when $975 is budget.

My only work-around is to view the budget under construction using the reports, but that requires changing screens, which is a) annoying, and b) takes a couple of seconds, even with a Core2 Duo.

Obvious arithmetic errors are unforgivable in a financial application. Fortunately, so far as I know, such errors are (thankfully) confined to the budget planning.

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