What are workarounds for breaking out sub-categories in Planned Spend

n2it

I am looking for suggestions for how to deal with categories in Planned Spend. Right now I have a Dining and Drinks category budget in Planned Spend. I want to break out a sub category (coffee shops) into a different budget line while leaving the rest of the DIning and Drinks in a seperate category - the issue is that morning coffee is non negotiable, but all of our other Dining and drinks choices depend upon how much we have left in the planned spend (or the left this month if we decide to exceed) and there is no way to select by sub categories - it is all or each. This not possible and seems unlikely to be addressed anytime soon (https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/3509/allow-ability-to-add-multiple-categories-to-planned-spending-expenses?utm_source=community-share)

My problem is that if I want to break out "Coffee shops" is that I don't like any of these workarounds:
1. Move Coffee shops from Dining and Drinks which clutters up categories with more categories and also means that it is no longer reported as a Dining and Drinks when looking at monthly spend - where it ultimately belongs.

2. Add the other sub categories as individual budget lines under Planned Spend - this both clutters it up - and does't help me as I don't want individual budget/planned spend lines for the other sub categories under Dining and Drinks

3. Combine all the other sub categories into one sub category and leave Coffee Shops as its own sub category. I don't like this because I might want to track other sub-categories in the future - and I still want to track fast food vs restaurants vs bars - just not budget differently.

4. Combine number 3 with tags, but this has both the problems of number 3 as well as the new problem of having to spend more time tagging.

Wondering what most people out there are doing or if there are other workarounds - as I don't view any of these as good solutions.

Thanks for your help.

Coach Natalie

@n2it, thanks for posting your inquiry to the Community!

I don't personally use Planned Spend this way, so I'm afraid I likely don't have the best advice for you, but I wanted to send you a response with some basic education on how Planned Spend works. Other users may come along with great feedback on how they accomplish something like this, though!

With that, I wanted to mention that, according to our help article, you can't have subcategories in Planned Spend when a parent category is already being tracked.

Note: Each top-level category can only be added once to the Planned Spending section. If a category or subcategory is already part of a used top-level category, it won’t be available to select again for monthly or one-time planned expenses.

I wanted to mention this, as Dining & Drinks is one of the built-in parent categories, so if you're tracking this category in Planned Spend, subcategories under it would also be counted toward it. So you may need to create individual expenses for each subcategory you want to track.

You might also consider using Watchlists instead of Planned Spend to track specific areas of spending: https://support.simplifi.quicken.com/en/articles/3472367-using-watchlists-on-the-web-app

I also found a couple of Idea posts that you may be interested in voting for!

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/1688/add-option-to-create-planned-spending-expenses-based-on-tags-2-merged-votes

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/3509/allow-ability-to-add-multiple-categories-to-planned-spending-expenses

I hope this helps!