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Shelley Elmblad was a personal finance software expert for The Balance, and has experience researching and teaching savings strategies over 20 years.

Quicken does a lot.

Thats partly how its remained one of the most popular financial software tools for decades.

But all the features be overwhelming to newcomers, and even regular users can feel like they arent using Quicken to its full potential.

Its helpful to become familiar with one of the most helpful aspects of Quicken: budgeting.

Even though the software can be a little daunting when you first open it up, dont be afraid to dive into the deep end and just try setting a budget.

Its a pretty straight-forward process, and you can always go back and change aspects of it (or start over completely).

Window users can find the tool by going into the Planning section of the software, then click Get Started under Create a Budget.

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Mac users have a Budgets tab, so simply open that up and click Get Started.

Most people find it easiest to run budgets from January through December of a calendar year, but you can adjust that to fit any unusual fiscal cycles.

Mac users choose a time frame in the primary dialogue box that creates a budget, but Windows users will have to go into the Advanced Budget Settings drop-down menu on the budget naming box.

Thats all there is to creating a budget From there you can customize to your hearts content.

Quicken automatically pulls from your past year or so of financial activity to create a basic budget for you.

It tracks spending amounts and highlights categories based on its best guesses for how the money was spent.

It also pulls income information and compares that to your spending habits to create a rough outline for a budget.

That menu will let you check and uncheck boxes to reflect your desired budget categories.

The exact budgeting amounts for each category can be altered directly from the main viewjust click into the field and change the number as you see fit.

Choose your categories by clicking on Select Categories, then change the spending amounts in the main view.

While youre in Graph View, categories will be accompanied by bars of various colors.

Understanding these colors will allow you to get an overall sense of your financial progress with just a glance.

In short, green means youre sticking to your budget, and red means youve slipped up, but you can glean more than that from the color bars.

It means you either havent made any money or spent any money in that area (depending on whether its an expense or income category).

The color bar next to categories can also contain light green or light red segments.

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