Are earmarks supported in Quicken?
There are no earmarks supported in Quicken. You can either do it the way you have (postdating a transaction way into the future and then editing or deleting it) or you could theoretically set up an “earmark” bank account and “transfer” your earmarked money to it. If you use the latter, your regular checkbook balance would be reduced by your earmark transaction and your dummy earmarked account would be increased. When you spend it you could either edit the original earmark transfer or make an entry in the earmark account to reduce the balance. What you are proposing makes perfect sense to me. It is very similar to the way state and local governments use an “encumbrance” system of accounting. All projected expenses are appropriated and encumbered at the beginning of the year and then as the bills get paid the encumbered balance is unappropriated. I’d drop a line to Intuit. They actually did put a feature into their QuickBooks product 2 years after I suggest it to them. Of course who know
