Adding on Business to Existing Personal Account

myers1562

I have been a Quicken user for years and Simplifi user since it came out and here are some things off the top of my head that users and development team needs to be aware of prior to adding on the business plan:

• NOTE: Pause when managing a lot of data. Simplifi does NOT work well when manipulating large numbers of data and its highly suggested that you save and close out of Simplifi occasionally to prevent simplifi normal functionality from "glitching" and causing more issues to clean up or even LOSS OF DATA and WORK NOT BEING SAVED.

• NOTE: If you use the data in simplifi for taxes i would recommend comparing historical Simplifi data for what you used for taxes to make sure it matches or you could be at audit risk.

1. New categories will be added to your system.
   1. although this is to be expected to add new tax info and to help separate business vs. personal transactions, there is no simple clean way to do any mappings from old categories to new business categories. You will need to do this for the life of transactions in you system!
   2. do not assume they have all of the categories mapped to all of the tax forms. they do NOT have anything mapped to S Corp or Partnership tax forms. HUGE MISS! you will need to work with your accountant to do the mappings.
2. "Usage" assigning your businesses to transactions vs. personal transactions
   1. after you have completed updating all of your transactions to new categories you MUST review ALL of your transactions for the life of the system and properly assign the "Usage" Business vs. Personal trans or reporting will not be correct.
   2. there is no easy way to bulk update historical transactions. the process of adding new categories will do this but this will not be 100% accurate.
3. Rules HAVE to be reviewed and updated
   1. after you get all of your categories and usage, you MUST review your rules to make sure these new categories and usage continue to update your transactions correctly
   2. there is no easy way to review all of the rules. the search functionality will not work 100% of the time, you will have many duplicate rules that will contradict each other.
   3. i cleaned up over 400 rules down to roughly 92 and my plan was to continue building out rules as transactions came in. however, due to Simplifi not handling large amounts of data changes at once 95% of my cleanup was reverted and i had to do it all over again.
   4. I would suggest deleting all rules and starting fresh and delete all rules and start over but there is no easy way of doing this.
   5. Rules will not work with recurring bills/subscriptions. DONT create a rule to add additional details to a transaction it will not work and cause your recurring not to match.
4. Products and Invoices need to be set up
   1. This feature is pretty robust, but it would be nice to allow you to track all hourly entries of work and roll them all up to the invoice. You can do this but your invoice will be very long or you need to continually update 1 item with more hours but if you do this you will not have every date entry making auditing and client transparency difficult.
   2. if you sell products and collect sales tax do NOT set up a product as a taxable item. if you do the system will calculate taxes for you based on the % you set, GREAT! However, the system will automatically decrease your income by the tax amount on the invoice. This will cause your reporting to be off because you will have separate transactions for where you already paid your sales tax and because your income is already decrease automatically by simplifi you will be short on income and then expense your sales tax "doubling" your sales tax impact to your reports. Suggested workaround is adding a tax product/item and calculate the taxes manually.
   3. the invoices in the transactions window are very complicated to follow, payees are not consistently assigned and all of the splits that are auto created do not group easily to see them in the transactions.
   4. not all transactions will show a status for invoiced items, you will only see sent and overdue but will not have a status on paid items.
   5. not all transactions will be able to be reviewed; this makes it challenging to keep up with all of your transactions needing reviewed b/c you have no way to filter them out.
   6. if you want to (and i recommend) enter in historical invoices for long term clients so you can see the full picture. Remember after doing this you need to audit the historical data with what you reported on your taxes because your data may no longer match and lead to huge audit risk.
5. Reviewing the reporting
   1. reporting is pretty nice but you DEFINITELY need to use them to check the work above in detail as any small miss categorization or ownership will throw this off.
   2. tax reports: now that you have everything cleaned up and working you would expect that your reporting for partnership and S Corp to work, NOPE! simplifi does not have any reports for this basically making the tax reports useless!
   3. Balance sheets work well but there is no way to see any historical balance sheets i.e. your doing your taxes and want a year-end balance sheet, you will need to do this on Jan 1st and save as a PDF/Print and save hard copy.

Final comments: I have worked with support on all of these items to ensure that set up was done correctly and i wasn't missing anything as I felt like there was a lot of room for human error due to all of the system glitching and number of modifications having to be done to complete set up. First level support will talk to you like your an idiot to start but if you keep on them, most of them seem to have more knowledge than they originally made it seem. However, in every support conversation i have been in they have had to escalate me to another support person to get on a call and go into more detail. These "tier 2" support techs are very knowledgeable as well but they really cant do much but help you try to find work arounds and escalate to the black hole (dev). I have half a dozen or so development escalations that i have had 0 response from them. Before going to escalation i wanted to ensure that i was correct in my setup and findings prior to escalating a "ghost" issue to them b/c i assume they have a lot on their plate. I asked for implementation/training resource to assist in the review of all the items I mentioned but this does not exist. When i originally started with Simplifi i had direct convos with dev team and actually felt heard and saw some of the changes i suggested implemented quickly, this is unfortunately not the case and have now turned into the stereotypical "IT Support" model that everyone makes fun of in the memes out there. I guess you "get what you pay for" b/c simplifi vs Quickbooks price doesnt compare and thats the only reason i havent switched. I have spent +-20hrs (still growing) in cleanup/setup since adding business and still do not have it set up cleanly.

My Background: I work with vendors on a daily basis for my clients and always provide realistic recommendations to enhance system performance, accuracy and simplification. I always approach with the mindset that the system was designed to accomplish what the users/owners attempting and attempt to mutually work together with the vendor to figure out the correct setup/workflow to maximize performance of the product. When there is no way or you are constantly being given "workarounds" I recommend realistic global adjustments to the system from the dev teams. You can tell how good a vendor is based on the outcomes of these discussions; I am not impressed by business add on and they have a lot to do to support their clients as Simplifi makes the system more robust. I am posting this in hope to be heard by the development teams to work on enhancements and to work on implementation/onboarding resources and staff to assist. There is so much potential with this system and at the price they could kill it in this market.

myers1562

I didnt have enough characters to add this in the original post. This post is very negative in "black and white" but it is meant to try and help improve and not a "knock" on anyone that has worked very hard in getting this far. I would consider the business add on as a beta product with high potential!

myers1562

more updates…
P&L report

should have total income minus cost of goods sold to get you gross profit.

then you deduct the expenses from the gross profit to get your net income.

Also, there are some expenses that need to not be included in the P&L as they are liabilities not expenses but there is no way to classify these as such. examples of these are Employee Federal Income Tax, Employee Social Security, Employee Medicare, Employee State Tax.

Lastly, since simplifi can have personal and business accounts, you should be able to "double categorize" a transfer. for example i transfer from my business account to my personal account for an owner distribution. this by default is a transfer so it balances on both sides but it also should be classified as a owner distribution for reporting.

Flopbot

@myers1562 ,

Full disclosure, I haven’t read your post yet. Though, I look forward to it. Just don’t have time right now. But the single biggest improvement with my experience with Simplifi’s business offering was to split out my personal from my business into a separate Shared Space. Each space has only those accounts allotted to personal | business. Before doing this, things got very confusing and I didn’t like it. After doing this, the clarity improved greatly.

DryHeat

@myers1562

Lastly, since simplifi can have personal and business accounts, you should be able to "double categorize" a transfer.

Simplifi doesn't do that. I don't think Quicken does either (or it didn't when I used it). Simplifi treats all accounts in one Space as related and treats movement from one to another as internal transfers by default.

But you can override that. If you unlink the two transactions you can categorize them separately. In your example one could be an owner distribution expense and the other an income transaction.

To avoid automatic categorization as transfers, you could do as @Flopbot does (and as I do) and put the business accounts in one space and the personal accounts in another. The effectively creates two entities and and movement of funds between them is considered external.

But be aware… you cannot at present move an account from one Space to another Space. If you have done a lot of work to clean up the transactions in an account, you would lose that if you decide to add that account to a different Space instead. You would have to do it all again.

myers1562

this spaces concept sounds like it would have been nice but i think i may have already done too much work that would potentially need "re-done" to switch to this.

in my opinion, this is another opportunity that i mentioned for simplifi to have an onboarding/implementation team to assist their clients getting the right set up done up front. i saw spaces and thought that was just a way to share specific information to external people (like CPA/accountant etc.)

DryHeat

@myers1562

there is no easy way to bulk update historical transactions. the process of adding new categories will do this but this will not be 100% accurate.

I did bulk editing a lot when I was setting up my accounts. The process is described in the article linked below.

You use filters to whittle down the visible transactions, then either select all using the top checkbox, select specific ones, or select all then unselect specific ones. Then you can edit all the selected ones at once.

Does it lack some feature that would have made it work in your situation?

https://support.simplifi.quicken.com/en/articles/3348103-managing-transactions-in-quicken-simplifi

DryHeat

@myers1562

I'd like to help you on this, but I'm not sure I clearly understand what the problem is. I generally review all new transactions to see if they are correctly categorized. But of course it is better if fewer of them need to be fixed.

there is no simple clean way to do any mappings from old categories to new business categories. You will need to do this for the life of transactions in you system!

It is possible to bulk edit transactions and change their categories all at once, or to delete a category and automatically assign all related transactions to a different category. But that is usually a one-time thing. Future automated categorization is done with Rules — not with some sort of category mapping system.

after you have completed updating all of your transactions to new categories you MUST review ALL of your transactions for the life of the system and properly assign the "Usage" Business vs. Personal trans or reporting will not be correct.

You can set an account to default to Usage=a particular Business or Usage=Personal and all transactions in that account should end up with that Usage.

Failing that, Rules can set the Usage and Category for you when a transaction is downloaded

Is the problem that you are having trouble setting up Rules to correctly categorize transactions when they are downloaded … so you have to edit a lot of them to get them right? Or is it something else?

DryHeat

@myers1562

Rules will not work with recurring bills/subscriptions. DONT create a rule to add additional details to a transaction it will not work and cause your recurring not to match.

I use Rules and Recurring Series together all the time. It works best if the Recurring Series name is a close match for the name applied by the Rename Payee operation of the Rule.

So, if my Rule renames a payee to "BEST DOGFOOD" then it's best if the name of the Recurring Series is "BEST DOGFOOD," rather than the original payee name that the transaction carried.

This issue is discussed in the following threads:

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/14760/which-payee-name-does-simplifi-use-when-matching-a-transaction-to-a-recurring-series

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/14664/advanced-transaction-rules-share-your-feedback-here

Does that match what you are seeing?

Flopbot

@myers1562

I can understand thinking it’s been too long with too much history and work. Still, your experience will be well worth it. Don’t forget, you can sync a single account to multiple spaces, so there’s no reason why you can go ahead and try it out in a new space and see how you like it. Don’t like it, just delete it. When I switched over, 3 years of transactions were downloaded so I didn’t lose too much info.