I’ve been using Simplifi to manage a tight household budget and track day-to-day and week-to-week spending. While I appreciate its clean interface and core features, I’ve run into several limitations that make it harder than it should be to manage the basic financial workflows of everyday finances. Here are some key challenges:
Key Frustrations:
- Planned Spending doesn’t show in Projected Cash Flow
I want to forecast weekly expenses like groceries and gas, but Planned Spending items don’t appear in the Projected Cash Flow view. To work around this, I’ve created recurring weekly placeholder transactions for each category, which feels redundant and manual. In doing this, I had to remove those expenses from Planned Spending which just feels… wrong. I thought I would be able to use Watchlists to track and manage Planned Spending instead, but: - Watchlists don’t account for reimbursements
When friends reimburse me for shared expenses (e.g., lunch), I categorize the incoming funds under the same category (e.g., Dining Out), but the Watchlist still counts the full expense without subtracting the reimbursement. This inflates my actual spending and makes it hard to track true out-of-pocket costs. I then have to either try and sort it out from Other Spend, or run reports, but: - Reports cannot be saved or bookmarked
I rely on reports to track monthly spending by category, but I have to rebuild filters every time I want to check progress. This adds friction to what should be a simple monthly review. - Flow-through transactions from savings to checking cause matching issues
I keep my money in savings and let it flow through checking for bills (go SoFi!). I've allocated my bills against savings for forecasting, but this causes auto-matching problems — it frequently overrides one of the transfer transactions incorrectly because it watches the wrong account for the transaction. - Savings Goals don’t reflect in Projected Cash Flow and can’t be scheduledI had to create manual recurring transfers to simulate savings goal contributions. Without dedicated vaults (like I use with SoFi) or separate accounts, this workaround wouldn’t be possible.
Workarounds I’m Using:
- Created weekly recurring transactions for groceries, gas, dining out, and health expenses to simulate real-world cash flow in the Projected Cash Flow view.
- Manually split transactions to isolate personal vs. shared costs, though Simplifi doesn’t allow negative splits or linking multiple transactions to one reminder.
- Re-categorized my SoFi savings account as checking to reduce matching issues with flow-through transactions and more accurately account for my available cash vs what I've tucked into savings.
Bottom Line:
I use a spreadsheet to manage my budget at a high level, and Simplifi seems like the best solution for tracking day-to-day and week-to-week expenses. But it doesn’t exactly live up to the name by making everything simple. I'm spending more time and energy trying to track everything than /I should. These improvements would make Simplifi far more usable for everyday budgeting and help users like me manage household finances in a simplified way.
