Quicken Simplifi Is SOOOOOOOO Boring!

DannyB

I just have to say, my personal day-2-day money dance has become quite boring because of Quicken Simplifi. 😴

For me the heart of QS is the Spending Plan where I can see clearly at the beginning of each month how my inflow and outflow are projected to circle each other, monitor the progress of my plan as it unfolds through the month and do a clean wrap-up once the month closes.

If necessary, I can make adjustments to the plan either for the current month because of circumstances unique to the current month by editing the current months recurring item or adjusting Planned Spending amounts. Or I can go deep and make a universal change via an edit of any given recurring series or Planned Spending category. This first of month review takes just a few minutes.

As the month progresses, it's a breeze to open QS to see where I'm at for the day. This tyically takes less than a minute and can be done right from the dashboard. But a single click and I'm in my Spending Plan where I can easily review all components of my current month's plan. I can quickly review my recurring income, bills, subscriptions and transfers/credit card payments. Then I can take a few seconds to scan my Planned Spending to see what's still available to spend in each category or to make on-the-fly adjustment if necessary.

Finally, when the month ends, I can do a review of all aspects of the dance, finalizing any outstanding issues and ensuring my plan was a fair representation of reality.

No fuss, no muss… boring… and that's a good thing!

SRC54

@DannyB I do the same as you each month with the Spending Plan.

I also alleviate boredom by rearranging my categories. I have never been happy with how the Spending Plan handles income taxes and tithes. Because this "spending" is not discretionary. Now that we are both retired (wife and I), we don't have to pay FICA and State Income Tax. Unfortunately, we still pay Federal Income Tax. As for our church tithe, which again is not discretionary but for us Christians something that doesn't even belong to us, it all ends up being seen as Spending.

I know I can exclude it from the Spending Plan but then it seems as though there is more money left over at the end of the month so that doesn't quite work. Also I cannot exclude the Income Tax since it is a split from income and right now you exclude everything or nothing. And I do like things to be real. So it is a quandary.

For now I have combined this into the category of Tithes (since tithe can mean a tax that is paid). I thought about calling it Tithes and Tribute. The second part for the government. Ha-Ha. As for the property taxes, they are part of the expense of buying things so I put those under Auto, Home. I put Sales Tax under Concomitant Spending since it is attendant to spending generally and is discretionary in the sense that it depends on how much one spends.

On a related note, I still struggle with Bills and Subscriptions. Right now I put my monthly church tithe as a subscription as it isn't a bill and we do underwrite the church. Generally I put automatic things paid such as YouTubeTV, Tennis Membership, Apple Cloud down as subscriptions. Utilities, Insurance and everything else is a bill. Again Bills are sort of unavoidable whereas Subscriptions are discretionary. No doubt I overthink this. 😀

DannyB

@SRC54

No doubt I overthink this. 😀

Perhaps… or I underthink the whole thing! I tend to miss a lot of details when it comes to a lot of things.

I don't bother trying to track income tax. My broker sends a certain percentage of our monthly draw to the US Treasury on our behalf which so far has been more than adequate to cover or tax liability (I work with my tax professional to review what we will need to pay each year.) I don't pay any attention to sales tax, let alone split it out. It just gets lumped in as part of the total expense. My county has set up a method for monthly payments to cover our property tax, so this has now become a monthly recurring bill instead of a monthly Savings Goal contribution.

I include all my charitable giving under "Subscriptions" as you mention as it is a planned expense. We will give to a variety of charities during the course of the year and these contributions land in Other Spending since I don't fund an "Unplanned Charitable Giving" Planned Spending category. This is not problem for me. We include in our annual budget a certain percentage of our income for charitable giving and divvy it up among causes dear to us including support for our religious community. All but the irregular giving are set up as auto transfers from my main cash account and QS easily tracks them for me.

The Bills and Subscriptions division is by QS's own admission an arbitrary distinction, I use them the same way you describe - Bills for non-discretion recurring expenses and Subscriptions for discretionary recurring expenses/spending.

SRC54

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/43186#Comment_43186

As for income tax, with the changes in the tax code made in 2017, there isn't much point for most middle class people to worry about employee expenses and charitable contributions, although it is still worthwhile in Alabama Tax Return. I do wish we could label certain categories as tax categories so that there could be a tax report so you could easily print those out either for your own taxes or if someone else does them. Quicken does this so well. Printing reports from Simplifi is just so ugly and haphazard. I wish they would add PDF support for Simplifi so we could easily print reports or email them.