Ability to exclude Refund Reminders from the Spending Plan (edited)

DryHeat

I need to mark an upcoming Refund as excluded from the Spending Plan, but can't find a way to do that.

I want to exclude it because it shows up as a transaction in Other Spend and throws off my spending amounts for the month. I can't edit that transaction in the normal way. I can only use the form for editing a refund, which doesn't allow excluding.

Here's the situation that makes this necessary:

• I paid for some friends' hotel room last month and I am expecting them to reimburse me this month. So I set up a Refund to remind me of the amount owing.
• I excluded their hotel costs from my Spending Plan last month because it artificially inflated my expenses. I want to exclude the refund/reimbursement this month so it won't artificially reduce my expenses.

I think this problem will occur for anyone who pays for something in one month and gets refunded in a different month.

EL1234

That's annoying! A workaround that might help (though it sounds very clumsy) is to create another fake expense reminder for the amount of the refund, and hide it from spending plan. It will offset the refund reminder, and once you get refunded, you can delete it. But it's definitely not an ideal solution…

DryHeat

@EL1234

You're right, creating a Reminder would work — that's what I used to do before I tried using Refunds.

The advantage of Refunds is that you can add Notes and Attachments, which you can't do with Reminders. It's handy to be able to do that for reimbursements like this as there are sometimes questions about who owes what to whom.

Temporarily I am changing the Amount of the Refund to $1.00 and putting the real amount in the Payee field with the Payee name. That way I have the notes, attachments, and amount available but the Refund has little effect on my Spending Plan. Kind of silly to have to do it this way, but it is what it is.

EL1234

What I really meant is leave the refund, and create a "dummy" reminder of the opposite amount to cancel out the refund in the spending plan. Then delete the dummy reminder once you get refunded, and mark the refund transaction to exclude it from spending plan.

DryHeat

@EL1234

I see. I didn't understand it that way because I thought you meant I should "hide it [the reminder] from the Spending Plan." I get it now. Good idea.

But I find it easier to just reduce the Refund to $1 and not create another Reminder. That's partly because I don't really care if the actual transaction (when it comes in) will match with the refund.

I've had such difficulty with the matching process (see below) that sometimes I wish it were possible to turn it off completely and just manually match transactions when they come it.

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/14979/auto-match-behaving-badly

EL1234

Yes I think I mistyped. And your workaround makes sense too!