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The Cash Flow Graph Should be Removed Until it Includes Planned Spend (edited)

buttersh

The cash flow graph is not useful to anyone and can be misleading. Without being tied to planned spending in the spending plan, everyone's graph shows the same thing - an ever-rising slope. This is not useful to anyone. The community has been asking for this to be fixed for 4 years. If it's not going to be fixed, let's remove the button, as it serves no purpose.

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Coach Kristina

Hello @buttersh,

Thank you for coming to the Community to share your feedback! When you say the Community has been requesting this for 4 years, are you referring to this post?

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/1651/ability-to-add-planned-spending-items-to-our-projected-cash-flow-edited-4-merged-votes

If this is what you are referring to, this is not a bug. It's a request to improve the function of the Projected Cash Flow by including Planned Spending items. The request has been sent to our product and development teams for review. We have not received any further updates.

Thank you!

EL1234

I use the cash flow graph on a regular basis and wouldn't want it removed. Recurring items that come out of my bank account are set up as bills so that the cash flow accounts for them. All categories that I set up in Planned Spending are paid via my credit card, so they affect my cash flow a few weeks later when the credit card bill is due. These are displayed on my cash flow (I used to update them manually, now they are done automatically and I like to double check just in case). This way my cash flow is more or less accurate for the upcoming month or so. I don't usually look at it further than that because I can't accurately predict exactly what the CC bills will be so far ahead. I wouldn't want planned spending to show in my cash flow because it would not be a realistic prediction for my account. My "planned spending" categories vary from month to month so I use it more as a "try not to spend more than X in this category" idea, but almost never max out all the categories every month, so budget-wise it doesn't matter to me.

SRC54

@EL1234 I agree with you. I don't look at the cash flow so much to be honest.

I wonder if it wouldn't help instead of all those lines if we could just combine all the spending accounts into one line so we see the overall cash flow?

As for including Planned Spend, isn't that just setting aside money in the Spending Plan and as you spend during the month, the actual transactions get included in the cash flow. Until then, it's just potential. Bills are going to happen.

EL1234

I only look at cash flow for one account at a time, the combined view isn't useful to me. The quickest way to get there is to click Transactions and then click the account you want (most often it's my checking account).

For your second point, I wouldn't want to include Planned Spend in the cash flow on my checking account's cash flow if I'm going to spend it across various credit cards. It'll get accounted for in the cash flow once the statements close and the credit card payments show on my cash flow projection for my checking account.

I suppose it would be fine if Simplifi put them on the projections for my credit cards since I don't look at those very often, but how would it know which accounts to show which amounts? That's aside from the issue of which dates to use for the planned spend since it could be spread out (evenly or otherwise) throughout the month.

SRC54

I look at the accounts one at a time too, but I could see where having all the Spending Accounts in one line in Bills & Income could be useful.

I use a lot of accounts to do my spending, but I would say your case is more common.

EL1234

I guess that one single combined projection line could represent a "projected net worth".

buttersh

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/57361#Comment_57361

Hi Kristina,

Yes, and other posts. What you have there is an income VS bills graph, not a cash flow graph. And the statement that future non-bill expenditures are not known in untrue. The spending plan both predicts future spending and fixes actual spent at the end of each month. So the data is absolutely available to make a cash flow graph, which is the most important thing that a PFM tool like Simplifi can produce. Right now, I would have to do it separately with a spreadsheet with all the numbers that are already available to me in Simplifi. And since the current income VS bills charts are per account, an actual cash flow line (including all inflows and outflows) could be added to that chart. But right now, Simplifi doesn't have the ability to show us cash flow because a good portion of our outflows are missing from the chart.