Cash Flow Graph should account for variable (Statement Balance) Credit Card payments each month

scottnliz

I use my credit card for most of my monthly purchases, other than critical bills like mortgage and power bill that don't accept credit card. And I pay the credit card statement balance in full every month so I'm not paying interest charges. The credit card payments come out of my primary Checking account, but the amount varies each month, based on how much spending I had in the previous statement cycle.

As a result, the Projected Cash Flow graph for my primary Checking account is totally wrong, because it doesn't account for the large credit card payment each month coming out of that account.

Is there a way to solve for this so this graph actually is meaningful?

I could add a recurring transfer each month for some fixed amount, but the amount would only be estimated, and wouldn't produce an accurate cashflow graph, that would warn me if my checking account was going to be too low and at risk of overdraft.

But Simplifi has all of my credit card expected recurring expenses, and planned spending items already in my Spending Plan, so it should be able to solve for this in an automated fashion, right?

achester99

I think perhaps you could click the three little dots in the right upper corner of the bubble for the upcoming credit card payment, select edit reminder, and simply change the amount to what will actually be paid out for that credit card cycle. That is what we do at the beginning of each month we edit the reminders for credit cards we pay off each month. Hope that helps.

mschauer

To do this, Simplifi would first need to know your statement close date and payment due date. Also, unless you are adding in your transactions manually, I can foresee some cases where they sync late, and then the calculated balance in Simplifi might not match what your credit card statement says. But, I totally agree - this would be a good feature that I've requested on other budgeting apps I've used in the past, but it never came to fruition.

natelaff

Quicken at least will let you use current balance as an option. This should be brought in. One of the last issues preventing me from moving from Quicken desktop.

JChaps

I realize this is an old post, but I figured I'd chime in how I do it (because I use my credit cards the same way as the OP).

When I pay my credit cards, I always pay on the due date. So, I've set up recurring transactions to occur on the monthly due date for each card.  The recurring transaction is set up as a "transfer" from my primary checking account to the credit card account.  The amount of the recurring transaction is a best-guess from average billing over recent months.

When my bill comes in from each credit card, I go to the upcoming transaction reminder for that card, and edit it to be the same amount as the statement balance.  So, for at least the upcoming payments that are scheduled they show up in the cash flow and I can make sure my checking balance isn't getting too low.

Because the recurring transfers are very rough estimates, I can't really trust the cash flow graph beyond the next 1 month, but that's enough for me to track and see whether my checking balance is getting low this month.

davesawyer

It seems like having an “always paid in full” option for credit card accounts with an accompanying “paid from” account listed would allow for aggregating its activity with the related bank account given the credit card usage is actually more closely aligned with usage patterns of a debit card. 

umwi

+1 for adding the capability to schedule the full account balance as a recurring cash flow datapoint each month.

Flopbot

I'd like this too! I follow this approach (click here) toward handling CC's in Simplifi and @scottnliz is right that you always end up spending half the month with a Projected Balance that is off. Personally, this doesn't bother me much since I know when to trust it and when to take it with a grain of salt. Once I enter the CC payment, the problem goes away and my Projected Balance chart is happy again till the next month.

That said, if Simplifi could find a better, more integrated way to do this, that would be awesome!

EL1234

I would absolutely like this! My credit cards are set to auto-pay on the statement due date. If I could tell Simplifi which checking account to use and have it automatically show it in the Projected Cash Flow, that would make Cash Flow a lot more useful :)

RobWilk

I personally pay off each charge typically within 24 hours of the charge being made [before it clears] (primarily to take advantage of rewards and credit card purchase protection)— but having a 'catch' (in case i haven't made a payment/forgot) would be useful, so I voted for this.

SMRT

I agree that Simplifi should be able to show projected CHASE scheduled credit card payments, paid by the "Wells Fargo" bank account.

Is this feature already available today?

UrsulaA

This idea sounds so close to this one.

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/6208/update-next-reminder-amount-for-credit-cards-automatically-using-the-account-balance-edited

BobS

Simplifi currently projects future account balances by projecting previous recurring activity using a repeated transaction amount. Some account activity, such as credit card payments, do not have constant recurring values. Projected cash flow would be more accurate if the user can specify an option for a Simplifi to calculate future transaction based upon say the average of the last 3 transactions of that same item.

ajbopp

Unfortunately, this is exactly the sort of scenario that Planned Spending is designed to take care of. You can set it up to calculate your credit card payment based on an average of the last X months.

However, I say unfortunately because Planned Spending is also currently not reflected in the projected cash flow. I like to think that this is on the dev team's radar, but at the moment circumstances have conspired to divert attention to nonsense like rollover (which has already forced them to back out at least one genuinely useful enhancement)

trd716

When creating a Reoccurring Series for my credit cards on auto-pay, I would love an option to set the projected cost of those bills to be a running average of the past 8-12 months. I just have a somewhat close average entered currently, but it would be great if the projected bill payment was an actual calculated average from history

Thanks!

DannyB

I'm not exactly sure how to think about this feature request. Is this about the projected cash flow charts in the individual bank accounts? Or is this a request for the "Cash Flow" tap on the Bills & Payments page? Or is this about all these projections?

Without some form of integration this is what my cash flow charts look like:

Checking Account: As much as I may wish this is to be a true projection of my cash flow…

Naturally, what is left out are all the recurring expenses that are paid through credit cards.

Credit Card Account: Again, this chart does not give me a true picture of my actual credit card balance.

What is left out here are the monthly balance payoffs.

For the individual account projections to have value, IMHO, two things: 1.) cc payments need to be reflected in these accounts. This can be done by changing the status, so cc payments are not excluded, but that creates problems for the Spending Plan; and 2.) planned spending expenses need to somehow be incorporated into the projections.

Putting these together via Bills & Payments > Cash Flow I can see the balance of my cc will never exceed my checking account balance, but again, this is not very helpful in showing my actual monthly cash flow and projecting it into the future.

Again, also missing in the projections are all my Planned Spending expenses.

Having some way to either integrate all recurring income, all recurring expenses and all planned spending expenses into one cash flow projection graph will be my dream come true for this feature.