Question: Why would I exclude a transaction from a Quicken budget?
Quicken can walk you through creating a budget or you can automatically create a budget for you based on the transactions you have entered in Quicken. One of the options during the Quicken automatic budget setup is excluding one-time transactions.
Answer: The one-time transactions referred in the automatic budget set up in Quicken are large, single transactions you make once and probably will not make again for a few years or longer. It is a good idea to exclude these transactions since they are so infrequent they will throw off the accuracy of your Quicken budget.
If you are creating a budget automatically with Quicken, be sure you have at least two years of transactions to base the budget on. This way, you will avoid having annual expenses (such as property taxes) or annual income (annual bonus) excluded when using the exclude one-time transaction option. If you have less than two years of transactions, avoid using the option to exclude one-time expenses so you don't unintentionally leave out annual transactions from your budget.
