Spending Plan - show totals for paid/spent vs upcoming/left (edited)

tngzng

Spending Plan is the reason I use Simplifi. I find it very helpful to see the average amount I can spend daily for the remainder of the month.

I would find it even more helpful if I could visualize my target spending rate for the month against my actual spending in a time series graph, similar to the image below. (The dotted line represents target spending, while the solid line represents actual spending): 
  

Would other Simplifi users find this helpful? Would this be a relatively easy feature for Simplifi's team to add? 

LWrathBudget

The Spending Plan is one of the best features of Simplifi, so I spend a lot of time on there. I would love to see what I've actually spent vs what's planned but not paid yet. For the Income after bills and savings, I'd like to see the total amount of what I've actually received or paid vs what is upcoming. And for the Planned spending, I'd like to see the total amount for all categories of spent vs left. This could also just be a report if it would be too much information on the actual Spending Plan. Thanks for reviewing my request!

Shawberry

I like where you're going with this. I was wondering if you could maybe elaborate on a specific situation for yourself where you felt seeing this difference would have been useful? 

LWrathBudget

@Shawberry That’s a good question — This would give me a quick, overall picture of what my financial situation is for the month. It would come in handy when trying to budget mid-month when some expenses have been paid, but not others. I’m coming from years of zero-based budgeting, and I’m trying to compromise a bit with this app, but I still want to be able to see what money from the Spending Plan is planned, but not paid yet and vice versa. I hope that makes sense. If I think of any other examples, I’ll post!

PhilipC

Maybe I'm missing where this may show up in an easy clean way but I would love to see the plan vs actual on the bills. This is shown very clearly on the "Planned Spending". 

What I'm thinking is watching for transactions that may start to creep like phone bills, or subscriptions that increase price that are missed via other ways.

DannyB

What I think would be a cool and helpful feature would be bar graphs simalar to what we have for Planned Spending cards for the Income, Bills, Subscriptions and Saving Goals in the Income after bills & savings section of the Spending Plan along with either/and how much is paid/saved to date and what is left to pay for the month. I envision these graphs being built right into the existing Headers for each of these something like like this:

The colors could be whatever is standard for Simplifi 🙂

DannyB

@LWrathBudget and @Shawberry

Ha, ha, ha… when I was writting this idea I was thinking I should do a search in the forum to see if it's already been suggested… and here it is!

@Shawberry here is an actual realworld example: Over the past couple of weeks I have been in conversation with our financial advisor about how much we need to start drawing from our retirement accounts. One of the final decisions was when to start the draw - start now in March or wait until April. I wanted to see what was left that we needed for March. Having that information in summary form as @LWrathBudget is suggesting and as I try to show in my mock up would have made that info easy enough instead of having to go into each dropdown and do an estimate of what was still left to pay.

altChristopher

• I like this.

blantonlewis

I love having the reminders that will show future cash flow. I would also love to see in my plans spending the projected amount or maybe whether I'm behind or ahead in terms of spending. That would help me decide whether I need to go out to lunch today or need to wait a couple of days!

ajbopp

I believe this is already available in the Spending Plan page

DannyB

@blantonlewis

Or perhaps you want something like this:

[removed self-referencing link to merged thread]

altChristopher

I wanted to see my spending plan by month total vs. my actual. I know categories will go off, but I want to ensure I am within a band of outcomes. Here is how this would ideally work:

1. Memorialize the spending plan for the current month when it starts (read: record it somewhere) - call it "plan".
2. Show me how I perform to plan over the past months.
3. Give three numbers: Plan (from #1), Actual (Actual $$), Forecast (Current Plan Remaining + Actual)

If I could have 10%, 25%, 50% bands shaded, that would be nice to have (not needed as other stuff more pressing)

This would show six months back and six months forward as a default.
Give me badges for hitting my plan… (Love badges)

I would not do this until after rollover spending and the project cash flow goals features are done to eliminate rework.

bc1656`

Would be really useful if there was a way to see how much of monthly bills and subscriptions have been paid vs how much will be charged in the coming days for a particular month.

Right now, when you open up the bills drop down it just shows the total of your bills for the month. Let's say for example 7k due this month. Would be much more helpful if when you opened up the bills header it said, 7k in bills this month, 4k already paid, and 3k not yet paid. That way you know what's coming out of your account in the coming days.

Not an issue if you only use one account... But if you have several bank accounts and several credit cards, it's harder to get a big picture view of your overall cash position without using a spreadsheet, which defeats the purpose of Simplifi.

Because this feature does not exist, I have to manually add up all the bills that have already been paid vs what’s outstanding, plus planned spending in a spreadsheet to see if my actual cash position for the month aligns with what Simplifi thinks is available in the available spending tab. A tedious process that could be easily avoided if the developers would just sum the data that's available in the Bills and Subscriptions tabs.

If you start the month with a cash balance other than zero, or if you hide a transaction, the amount available will never match your account balance. Not a big deal if you have a cash buffer in your account, but if you don't you can get in hot water. Would be much easier to just do some simple math… checking balance is 10,000 I have 3k bills & subs outstanding, 2k planned spending outstanding, 1k saving goals… I'm good.

On a related note, would also be great if there was an option to sort the items in bills and subscriptions by category rather than that just have them sort by date. Thanks!