How can I monitor spending by category AND tag?

tylertervooren

My wife and I collaborate in a single Simplifi account and we tag transactions that belong to each of us. There are categories we both spend on but one of us would like to watch our own spending more closely.

Examples:

• We both spend on hobbies, but I spend more and want to reign myself in.
• We both buy clothes for ourselves and our daughter, but she spends more and wants to reign herself in.

I'd like to budget or monitor how much I spend on hobbies MINUS her spending. She wants to track her clothing spend MINUS my spending.

I can see two ways to do it, but I don't care for either of them:

1. Reports. Easy to do, but requires too much activation energy (too much clicking, filtering, drilling down) to be useful as a daily tool and no notifications (I think?) to help us stay on track.
2. Custom tags. Make tags named me hobbies and her clothing. This would make it possible to track with the spending plan or watchlists, but it pollutes the tag list—especially if we want to set up more category tracking later—and the data (categories and tags) are already there. I just can't use them.

Am I missing any other options? I'll set up option #2 if there's no better way to do it.

Thanks!

UrsulaA

I started to track how much I spend on each of my teenage daughters. I already have a parent category, Kids, that captures most of the spending associated with the children. However, I also buy gifts and shop for them - these transactions get tracked in categories outside the Kids parent category.

So, I am using approach 2 listed above. Created a tag with each daughter name and then I can filter reports by each tag and see quickly how much I spend on each.

Instead of using me hobbies as a tag, I suggest just using your name. Then, there will be less tag clutter. In that way, you can filter by category and then have the report display spending by tag or the other way around.

tylertervooren

Thanks, Ursula. Sounds like you're using/combining both approaches I mentioned. I think that's probably what we'll do, too. I was just hoping I could reduce the amount of clicks/steps required to get the info we want. If watchlists were improved to allow multiple conditions (eg. category AND tag), I think that would take care of it. Until then, we'll do what you suggested.