Option to mark a reminder as paid but show transaction under Planned Spend category instead of Bills

savvvvy

Hello,

I'm a new user of the app and I love using it. One observation I had is that all of the recurring expenses seem to only show up under the Bills section of the Spending Plan.

I have expenses that are not typically bills but I set up a recurring series to remind me of that expense. I love the idea that I can mark the reminder as paid and it shows up as a transaction. However, the transaction only shows up under Bills section. I do have a Planned Spend category set up for it with a specific budget and would like to have the flexibility to show it as an expense under that Planned Spend category instead of showing it together with actual bills.

I hope this makes sense. Not sure if there is another way to go about it this time without creating a transaction. I'm one of those that doesn't link a bank account to the app and would prefer to continue tracking expenses manually. Any suggestions would help.

Thank you so much! :)

SRC54

Yes, what you say makes sense and it is confusing often for new users as it was for me when I first started with QS.

The theory is that Bills are regular payments that must be paid so they get paid first. So they are a separate entity in the Spending Plan. They are not discretionary since you have already incurred them or authorized them.

Planned Expenses work differently. They work more like a regular budget in that you set a limit for the category in how much you are going to spend that month. These are usually things like food, clothing, recreation, etc. You have a little more control over them so you can theoretically cut down on your spending as you near the end of the month to stay within budget.

This system is not perfect as sometimes you have to spend more money for food or clothing anyhow. You just go over budget.

I have a lot of bills for which I also have setup a Planned Spending category. My utilities are bills but my other home expenses are things like supplies. The bills end up in the bills section and the supplies end up in the Planned Spending section. But note that in reports all of this will be shown under Home Expenses.

If you prefer that something that is recurring not be in the Bills section but in the Planned Spending section, you can after you mark it paid just unmark it as a bill and dismiss the now superfluous reminder from your Spending Plan. This way you get the reminder every month (or whatever interval you have) but it ends up in Planned Spending. That would be my workaround.

I searched for a Feature Request on adding ability to include Bills in Planned Spending but didn't find any (I could have missed it) so if you want to pursue this, you can submit your own request.

I hope this makes some sense.

EL1234

I think I might have posted this feature request once years ago, but I can't say for sure :)

Or it might have just been a comment on someone's post…

Coach Natalie

Here are a couple of Idea posts I found on this topic:

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/4880/have-recurring-transactions-show-up-in-planned-spending-edited

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/8495/integrate-planned-spending-with-recurring-items-in-the-spending-plan-edited

EL1234

To be fair, now that Bills are a separate section instead of being lumped under Income in the Spending Plan, a lot of those complaints don't really exist anymore.

I think the key part to understand is that recurring bills aren't ignored in the spending plan, they're just in a different section. So to see all your expenses for the month, you'd need to look at Bills + Planned Spend + Other Spend.

It gets confusing when you have a category in spending plan for which you also have a recurring bill, as that category won't include the bill, so you'd need to either reduce the monthly amount for it under Planned Spend, or just not use bills and planned spend for the same category.

I agree that it would be a nice feature to have an option on a recurring series to place these transactions inside of the spending plan instead of the bills section.