Some things to keep in mind when setting up your budget are:
- It's easiest to start a budget after you have three months worth of transactions in Quicken. This is because the software pulls in all recurring expense categories automatically when a new budget is created.
- If you used Quicken in the past and upgraded to the latest version, your data file was converted to the latest version. The last twelve months worth of transactions will automatically be used to create the budget.
- New budgets will show average monthly expenses going forward, based on expenses from prior months and amounts are rounded up to the next dollar. If you're looking to improve your spending habits, you will need to make some changes to the budget Quicken automatically generates.
- The new budget will only include expense categories, but if you want to add monthly income and transfers between accounts, I'll show you how to do so in step three of this tutorial.
