Do i now still need to keep a regular checkbook?

LynnD

Thanks for accepting me into this community. This is all brand new to me . My husband set it up but now I am taking it over. I just have basic questions…..Do I still need to keep a checkbook? Do I put in and checks I write or wait till they show up from my bank? What exactly do I need to be inputting to our checking accounts on here? Sorry if these are basic questions, but I need to start somewhere.

SRC54

Well, once I started with financial apps, I stopped doing an actual checkbook. You may want to wait a few weeks until you are more comfortable but I think you will be able to drop the checkbook.

As for entering your own transactions and waiting for them to download, both methods are viable so it is up to you. If your bank downloads pending transactions fairly quickly, you can wait for them to download and then categorize them and split them as you like. If you download them first, you can help teach Simplifi your preferred Payee Names and categories.

If you enter them yourself as you spend money, Simplifi will memorize your Payee names when you use them. I do it both ways depending on the account. It is totally up to you.

It is really up to how you want to do it. It sounds like this is your first checkbook app so go slow and don't stress. 😀

RobWilk

I stopped using a checkbook back in the early 2000's when I started using Managing Your Money &. Microsoft Money and eventually switched to Quicken ("Classic") and by 2021 Quicken Simplifi.

However, with fair warning, from time to time there are issues that come up. (*"Problems" might be another word for issues), where either the bank doesn't sync at all for a period (depending on the bank, a short period or a long one) and during that period you might 'have' to manually enter transactions —- also, recently there were issues where the pending amount at the bank was being counted twice (I don't "think" that will happen again now that they fixed it and presumably put in safe guards like unit tests to prevent it from happening again), and when that happened, you couldn't count on the balances in Quicken Simplifi. Right now, everything's working perfect for me, though. One thing to note, from time to time downloaded transactions don't match your transactions properly, but you can retrain it by unlinking wrong ones, and linking right ones manually.

For me, it's worth it, I hated having to do math in a checkbook, or even have to write down all my transactions (whether check or debit or online payment), plus seeing long term net worth and being able to use the spending plan to know i'm (trying to be) not spending more than my monthly income - it's like a game trying to stay under, balancing out how much per day i have left and trying to (on average) spend less than that daily (I am not.a fan of 'rollover', and don't use it, but some people seem happy with that if you want to carry extra funds from previous month to this month, but that kind of defeats the purpose of trying to spend less than monthly income in a month). If you go over on the spending plan, it lets you know, but it's not the end of the world, just try again next month.

-Rob