Can anyone recommend a good budgeting program for my computer? I'm looking for something that will let me enter my budget and then add my expenses as the month progresses so I can compare how our spending is going as to where it should be. I have Quicken 2001 and thought that it had something like this. However, it seems like all they have for budgeting is a chart where you can enter your monthly expenses. It doesn't let you enter any customized spending categories or enter a "master budget." Anyone know of a program that might be what I'm looking for? Thanks!

We just use a spreadsheet for these sorts of things. I made a template with categories and expenses and then copied it onto a different page for each month.

i *think* i understand what you want. and I think quicken does it. i'm on my mac right now (at home) but search your help...u'm fairly certain that I have done this on my pc (just switched from paying bills on the pc because my mac is in my living room)

Hmmm.....maybe I'll have to do some more researching on my Quicken. I was pretty disappointed by what I saw so maybe I'm just missing something.

And thanks for the spreadsheet suggestion, Angela! I haven't had much experience with Excel, but this might be the time to learn if I can't find what I'm looking for. :)

quicken 2002:

banking ->budgeting
at the top of the screen that opens there are 3 tabs:
setup
budget
summary

when i choose setup

i then get a window that lets me create a budget with several options: automatic, manual or copy current (ok I have already done the budget so I have a current one, that might not appear for you). It lets you specify the dollar amounts for each category you want. I created new categories for stuff that I wanted to divide out. Pet expenses for instance.

so say you get it all set up to the totals how you want it.
then when I go to summary
I can get the graph and totals.
there's a spot where I can specify "options" (and tell it how I want which categories displayed) and I can get a monthly report. I *think* on that monthly report you can even see all your transactions divided by category.

Check out your quicken, I have been using it to do things like this for about 6 years. Each edition gets more sophistocated, of course, but I always have the cheapie version -- never the deluxe version. Honestly once I figured out what the heck i was doing, it was nice it was all automated. I regularly use excel for work and could program it to do all that, but that was much more work!

I hope that helps a little bit. basically my take home message is search the help on your quicken edition....it probably does nearly everythign you want.

Thank you Kerc! Mine is slightly different than yours but I finally figured it out. Thank you for pointing me in the right direction. :)