Actual Spending vs. Budget

ELH

Is there a way to show my actual vs. budget for the month (ideally per category)?

DannyB

In the Spending Plan you can scan your recurring transactions under the various headings in the "Income after bills and savings" section to see what's received (Income) or paid (Bills, Subscriptions, Savings Goal contributions).

In the Planned Spending section you can see your progress for each planned spending category.

If you are talking about your actual categories used to sort out your monthly spending (Settings > Categories and tags) you can use Watchlists to track you spending that will give you a "Spent so far" amount and a "Projected" amount. The Projected is tricky though.

You can set up Watchlists using Category, Payee, Tag.

Max1223

I love watchlists due to the fact they include FUTURE Bill and Subscriptions. This is great as you see a full month's view even at the beginning of the month. So as your actual expenses are counted, you see a view including those Bills.

Where I'd say QS wording is a little misleading is "Spent so far". While this is true, it's not 100% accurate as an actual expense as it includes those future Bills, which, could be inaccurate, eg. a bill is skipped, the cost of the bill changes, etc. Wordy but more a more accurate title would be "Spent so far including future Bills/Subscriptions" or "Actual Spend plus Bills"

100% agree that Projected is tricky. That number is noise for me and I'd be happy to not see it, or a checkbox in settings to "show Projected" for those who find value in it.

ELH

Thank you both for your advice! Please let me know if I am understanding this correctly. If I enter something in "Bills" (under Income after Bills & Savings), then I should not enter it under "Planned Spending" or else it will count twice in calculating what I have available. So if I want to enter something under Bills and also keep track of it, I need to use Watchlist. Or is there another way?

If the above is true, is there a way to automatically enter my "Planned Spending" categories as a Watchlist too or do I have to enter them twice? I really would like to monitor all my monthly spending by category.

Max1223

@ELH great question, yes, I think once it's entered under Bills, it won't be double counted. I have some fitness "bills" and some fitness non bills, QS seems to keep this separate.

Watchlists are completely separate from the Spending Plan. Since QS does not allow to save a Report, I use watchlists as saved reports, but note it does calculate future expenses, so not a true of actual, prior expenses. Spending Plan is more like a budget planning tool.

Reports seems to be the most accurate report of actual Income, Expenses, etc. Just tracks actuals from your accounts.