Rollover unused Spending Plan money [edited] (10 Merged Votes)
Comments
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This was my reaction as well. One of the product managers reached out to me when I made similar comments and we briefly discussed why I found this important. So its at least on their radar, not sure if/when another update to include it will be coming.
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Good! It has made rollover useless to me as it is too much math to keep up with to maintain a budget.
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@Coach Natalie - this seems like a complete must have feature.
The new planned spending rollover is nice… but I shouldn't have to deal with that, or goals when it comes to my leftover money at the end of the month.
Here is what typically happens for me:
March - Income is higher than normal because of a tax return - yay government! Call it $1,000 left at end of month.
I don't have plans for this money, so I don't assign it to a planned spending category, or a goal.
April 1st arrives. Now I can't really do anything with that $1,000 in Simplifi. It's just stuck in the void floating around.
April - Expenses are higher than normal because of unplanned spending - yay medical bills! Call it $800.
I know I had $1,000 left at the end of March, but I have to keep track of that somewhere else because Simplifi can't do it for me. So in April it just feels like I'm $800 in the hole.
Please have your team use some other budgeting apps out there. YNAB did this really well IMO. In the case above, I would start April up $1,000 because of unused funds in March.
If that is too difficult for your team to build, what if you just allowed me to contribute to my goals even after the month is over?? Right now I can't even do that. If on April 5th, once all of March has leveled out, I could look back and say 'hey, I have $1,000 left over - let's move that to my X goal.' That would at least let me pull this money out of the void and into a more usable form.
There are far too many paying customers complaining about this problem that you all don't seem concerned with solving. That is very concerning.
I'm happy to jump on with anyone from your team to walk through my experience, as well as how YNAB works for my business budgeting.
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@jaymesdowner It sounds like you're describing an annual budget need, and if so I 1000% agree with this as being a deficiency in Simplifi. I want and need to be able to look at the total of all money coming in this year, and the total of all money going out this year both actual and planned.
As far as solution implementation, I would not want to just inherently roll over all unused funds. I do not spend every penny I make, nor do I want to assign every penny to a budget or savings category. Implementing this way would leave me with the second half of every year having a monthly budget availability that is very out of place with reality. I'm not against what you want as an option, but I wouldn't want it to be the primary or only solution to the lack of annual budgeting in the product.
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1000% agree we need to be able to rollover unused and unallocated money from month to month. I don't allocate all of my money to my planned spending every month so if i have leftover I’d love to be able to start the next month with that amount plus my income for that month (or if i went over subtract that from my starting amount). This would be especially helpful when my one of my biweekly paychecks lands on a day at the end of the month and is essentially the next month’s paycheck. If Simplifi added this it would be a near perfect tool for me.
Also if they could just figure out how to connect to my Fidelity pension…….0 -
If you roll over your unspent money month to month, how is it different than a balance? Won't hiding transactions from such a spending plan make it look like you have more money than you do, which will only get worse over time?
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Rob Wilkens2 -
i've been using simplifi for a couple months and enabled the early access for rollovers, and for my finances, it's more likely to be misleading rather than being helpful in any way…
- the monthly reset has no memory. the rollovers of planned spending help, but there's currently no good way to handle any left over "available" money in the spending plan.
- i got tax refunds this month, so i have extra available money in my spending plan. i shouldn't be forced to spend it this month to make my spending plan look nice. if i make a big purchase next month, even though i have the money, it'll look bad unless i manually exclude the transaction and/or set a custom income.
- all savings goals are short-term with an implied spend it all once you meet it. and the month you spend it, you have to manually exclude the big transaction to avoid messing up the spending plan again…
basically…it feels like the spending plan is catered to only one type of user, which is someone that a) has predictable monthly income, b) has predictable monthly expenses, and c) lives paycheck to paycheck.
(a) and (b) can be manually fixed monthly, which is tedious. but for (c), if you're someone that consistently has extra money left over, there's currently nothing in simplifi to help you allocate that towards investments, which is how you meet your retirement goals.
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- 1. and 2. (Or a and b - I got confused): My impression has always been that Quicken Simplifi is a budgeting app, not a spending-income tracking app. The spending plan shouldn't change depending on whether you got a tax refund.
3. (Or c) Quicken Simplifi tells you what your account balances are at any given time, and what they are projected to be at any future point in time. That should provide an indication of how much you can invest, now and in the future.
Anthony Bopp
Simplifi User Since July 2022Money talks. But all my paycheck ever says is goodbye1 -
I like the idea of being able to retroactively contribute to goals. This makes sense in the context of "releasing" funds because that is usually done a few days after the end of the month. At the same time, it seems like some of these responses are people basically requesting accounting software rather than a budgeting app. I'm really enjoying the app and aside from a few improvements (bringing back the planned spending summary that was jettisoned to make room for rollovers, treating split transactions as separate transactions, and beefing up savings goals functionality (like treating a withdrawal from savings as an increase to income in the spending plan so you don't have to exclude purchases from spending plan)… all of which I've voted on), I think the app is great.
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The only use I have for rollover planned spending is to spread annual or semi-annual bills out over my monthly spending instead of being 1 time hits. However, since these are also recurring bills, they don't count against the spending category when I do pay them. I would be really good if we had the ability to choose whether certain bills counted for a rollover spending category instead of as a bill.
Sure there are workarounds. I've done things with transfers and/or savings goals, but the savings goals require you to actually "contribute" every month and transfers can't be categorized without unlinking the 2 sides for the transfer (since transfer to/from account takes the place of category). This also resulted reports having to exclude the annual bills to not double count things. There are probably other options too, but all around, nothing that works great to spread the cost of an annual bill across my monthly budget and still easily show the category total correctly in reports.
If I could decide which recurring bills counted against rollover planned spending, that would be the best option to both spread the (estimated/approximate) cost out over the year and still easily view the actual spending in the various reports. For example, my homeowners insurance which is subcategory of home doesn't show up in the sum of last year's home spending because I had to hide from reports and spending plan in order to not have it through off monthly spending and cashflow. I use transfers to count the spending in the monthly budget, but that doesn't show up under the home category since it was a transfer.
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I agree completely!
(Well I'm using rollover for other things, but I chose not to use it for recurring, but less than monthly, bills for that reason.)
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