Transfers are not being included in spending plan

ewd_20834756

I have set up a manual liability account to keep track of my student loan balance and another for my auto loan. Whenever my monthly payment is charged, the series knows to create a transfer transaction of the same amount in the manual liability account. This is because the loan payment transaction series has a rule to change category to a manual liability account transfer. I have additional rules on the series to include money out in my spending plan and reports, but money in is ignored. However, and this is where my frustration comes from, the loan payment transaction is ignored from my spending plan and reports no matter what and when I try to manually include it, it throws an error saying you cannot create a transaction as a self transfer. It also seems like whenever the loan payment transactions occur each month, they are not automatically linked to the series and I end up having to manually add them.

All I want to do is automatically keep track of manual liability accounts based off of payment transactions while still including those payment transactions in my spending plan and reports while keeping them automatically linked to the series. This has been a constant frustration of mine with this software, and right when I seem to figure it out, the software changes or a bug is introduced which breaks this whole system. Each time something goes wrong it leaves fragmented transactions or series which end up giving me incorrect spending and report data that is very hard to track down. It has been a constant headache and makes me question whether I should look at other software products.

SRC54

@ewd_20834756

It's been a long time since I had a loan account, but a few questions to understand better what you are trying to do:

1. When you make a payment, it is done as a transfer to the manual account?
2. Do you have fixed interest that is part of the transaction and categorized as an expense?
3. Do you exclude the principal payment part from reports and spending plan?
4. Do you include the interest part in spending plan and reports?

If the interest part varies, I don't see how it could all be automatic, but you could guestimate and then fix it afterwards. So does your recurring transaction look something like this:

Another way to do this would to do a simple recurring transfer to the manual loan account from your checking account (excluded from spending plan and reports by default. When it clears your bank, it should be matched and then show up in both accounts. Then you could have a recurring interest payment tied to the loan account. Each month you could manually mark it paid and update the interest if necessary.

This might not help much but might help flesh out what you are doing.