Enhanced Planned Spending with Miscellaneous Category

Diegob

Hi Quicken Team,

I’m a longtime user of Quicken and appreciate the powerful tools it offers for managing finances. I’d like to suggest an enhancement to the existing planned spending feature that I believe would greatly benefit users.

Currently, Quicken tracks planned spending by specific categories like groceries, dining, and transportation. However, it would be incredibly useful to have a general “miscellaneous” or “other/fun” category. This category would cover various expenses that don’t fit neatly into the main categories. For example, a ferry ticket under transportation or a gift for a friend under gifts don’t currently fall under my “other/fun” category, even though they are part of my discretionary spending.

Otherwise, as of now, I’d have to put a ferry ticket, a friend’s gift, and a broken phone screen fix all under “fun spending,” but that defeats the purpose of having a detailed end-of-the-month review of where my spending is going. This means not having the ferry ticket under travel, the gift under gifts, and the phone screen under maintenance purchases.

Having an umbrella category for planned spending for “other/fun” expenses would allow users to better plan and track their fun or discretionary spending without having to reclassify or split transactions across different categories.

Thank you for considering this suggestion. Implementing this feature would make Quicken even more user-friendly and versatile, helping users to more effectively manage their overall budget.

DannyB

Hi @Diegob

I may not be understanding exactly what you are suggesting here. Since Quicken Simplifi is so flexible, you can create these categories yourself.

Go to "Setting > Categories & tags and click on +Category. This will open the Add category window and you can add whatever category you desire. Once your new category is created you can go to Spending Plan > Planned Spending and click on Expense to add a new Planned Spending bucket for your Miscellaneous or Other/Fun expenses. I have "General Expenses" and "Other Fun Stuff" Planned Spending buckets that function the way you describe

You will probably still need to designate the category for your miscellaneous spending, but if any of these expenditures are repetitive QS will learn to use that category or you can create a rule for repetitive miscellaneous or other/fun spending.

On the other hand, QS does have a "miscellaneous" feature of a sorts already built into the Spending Plan - "Other Spending." This is a catch all section for any spending not identifiable by QS.