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Simplifi Needs Better Support for Real-World Budgeting & Cash Flow Forecasting
I’ve been using Simplifi to manage a tight household budget and track day-to-day and week-to-week spending. While I appreciate its clean interface and core features, I’ve run into several limitations that make it harder than it should be to manage the basic financial workflows of everyday finances. Here are some key challenges:
Key Frustrations:
- Planned Spending doesn’t show in Projected Cash Flow
I want to forecast weekly expenses like groceries and gas, but Planned Spending items don’t appear in the Projected Cash Flow view. To work around this, I’ve created recurring weekly placeholder transactions for each category, which feels redundant and manual. In doing this, I had to remove those expenses from Planned Spending which just feels… wrong. I thought I would be able to use Watchlists to track and manage Planned Spending instead, but: - Watchlists don’t account for reimbursements
When friends reimburse me for shared expenses (e.g., lunch), I categorize the incoming funds under the same category (e.g., Dining Out), but the Watchlist still counts the full expense without subtracting the reimbursement. This inflates my actual spending and makes it hard to track true out-of-pocket costs. I then have to either try and sort it out from Other Spend, or run reports, but: - Reports cannot be saved or bookmarked
I rely on reports to track monthly spending by category, but I have to rebuild filters every time I want to check progress. This adds friction to what should be a simple monthly review. - Flow-through transactions from savings to checking cause matching issues
I keep my money in savings and let it flow through checking for bills (go SoFi!). I've allocated my bills against savings for forecasting, but this causes auto-matching problems — it frequently overrides one of the transfer transactions incorrectly because it watches the wrong account for the transaction. - Savings Goals don’t reflect in Projected Cash Flow and can’t be scheduledI had to create manual recurring transfers to simulate savings goal contributions. Without dedicated vaults (like I use with SoFi) or separate accounts, this workaround wouldn’t be possible.
Workarounds I’m Using:
- Created weekly recurring transactions for groceries, gas, dining out, and health expenses to simulate real-world cash flow in the Projected Cash Flow view.
- Manually split transactions to isolate personal vs. shared costs, though Simplifi doesn’t allow negative splits or linking multiple transactions to one reminder.
- Re-categorized my SoFi savings account as checking to reduce matching issues with flow-through transactions and more accurately account for my available cash vs what I've tucked into savings.
Bottom Line:
I use a spreadsheet to manage my budget at a high level, and Simplifi seems like the best solution for tracking day-to-day and week-to-week expenses. But it doesn’t exactly live up to the name by making everything simple. I'm spending more time and energy trying to track everything than /I should. These improvements would make Simplifi far more usable for everyday budgeting and help users like me manage household finances in a simplified way.
Re: Projected Cash Flow: One line that represents all selected accounts (edited)
For those of us with multiple bank accounts, the cashflow view is only useful if we can see a consolidated cashflow flow. By consolidated, I mean one line that shows the combined net balance of selected accounts.
DCClark
Re: Projected Cash Flow: One line that represents all selected accounts (edited)
I disagree, cash flow lets me forecast each balance into the future. I primarily use it to see, for example, how much will my primary checking account (I have 3-4 checking accounts) will be just prior to the next income on that account, so i know what's "really left" in that account after known bills come in.
I won't vote against your idea at this time, though, as this may still be interesting to have.
-Rob
RobWilk
Re: Projected Cash Flow: One line that represents all selected accounts (edited)
There is an existing similar idea though, with not-that-many votes:
[removed link to merged thread]
RobWilk
Re: Planned spending report and export
Planned Spending is not a "future transaction". Future transactions are :
- Future dated transactions entered in the register
- Recurring Series (Settings → Recurring)
There are no "dates" on planned spending, so it would be difficult to impossible to guess where to put them in a report like that. Planned spending is primarily for holding money aside for the spending plan, and outside of the spending plan 'planned spending' currently serves no other purpose.
RobWilk
Planned spending report and export
Reports and exports should be able to include future transactions from the planned spending. We should be able to run a report that includes both historical activity and future activity as well as be able to export anything we view whether past, present or future.
DCClark
Re: Ability to Exclude part of a split transaction [edited] (3 Merged Votes)
Hello - any update on this from the product team? This is the feature that in my view will make Simplifi complete.
Re: Credit Card Bill Statement Balance
Hello @ds824,
Thanks for reaching out! We converted your post into a discussion, as we already have a great feature called Bill Connect for Credit Cards that covers this topic. With Bill Connect for Credit Cards, Quicken Simplifi automatically updates your credit card reminders using real-time balance and due date information pulled from your connected account. Once set up, Quicken Simplifi uses your online banking connection to retrieve bill data—such as statement balances, total balances, and minimum dues—based on your selected preference.
For more detailed information on this feature and how to use it, you can view our support article here:
I hope this helps!
-Coach Jon
Re: Add "APCU | Center Parc" - Atlanta Postal Credit Union
It looks like the APCU recently renamed ("two names" they say on their site). This is good news, thank you.
-Rob
RobWilk
Re: Add "APCU | Center Parc" - Atlanta Postal Credit Union
@RobWilk, thanks for posting your bank request to the Community!
I have moved this out of Missing Financial Institution Requests for now, as I see an option listed as "Members Alliance FCUGA" in Quicken Simplifi that has the same URL you provided above.
Let us know if this bank option works for you!


