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Proper budgeting functionality

grahonan

The watchlists are a great start, but I could create a dozen watchlists and have no idea that they sum up to more money than I make every month! The watchlists need to get summed up so you see your total money in and out each month. A paid service like Simplifi really needs this functionality in my opinion.

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Feature Request

Status: Completed

Comments

IowaBeta

It would be very helpful if a person could put in a full budget. I understand that you can create Watchlist items that will track progress, but that appears to be for one category or a group of categories. Am I missing something?

Coach Tappan

Hello! I'm Coach Tappan. Welcome to Simplifi, and thanks for your comment. Simplifi was designed to be a quick and easy program that allows you to review recent transactions and keep an eye on upcoming income and expenses with a minimum of effort. If you need to create and track detailed budgets, the Quicken product suite would probably be a better fit, but we'll certainly pass along your request for more robust budgeting features in Simplifi to our development team. We appreciate your comments and suggestions, so we can make Simplifi a product that works better for you!

Laura

Agree here too! I picture Simplifi as a more user friendly (closer to Mint) Quicken product (maybe aimed at a new generation of customers). I’m not sure how long someone would stay with a product that really only allows month to month planning.

Coach Paco

@Laura We appreciate the feedback!

grahonan

Quicken Deluxe has what I need and is $10 cheaper for 12 months.

Coach Tappan

@grahonan I understand your point. One of the things we're trying to accomplish during this product launch period is to help users evaluate whether Simplifi would be a better solution for their financial needs than Quicken, and a better value for them. Users who need powerful tools to manage all of the details of their finances, and fine-tune reports to show exactly what they want to see, might find Quicken a better solution for them. However, I like your idea of being able to link information from several Watchlists to produce reports that show a bigger picture, and I'd be happy to submit the idea to our development team to see if we can incorporate it in a future update. Thanks for your comments!

ryanlg

I agree - the watchlists are a bit clunky and require a lot of work arounds to accomplish what we should be able to have. I understanding innovation, but sometimes a budget is just a budget. Would be great to add multiple options for users.

Coach Nicole

Thank you so much for your feedback!

iberamen

I'd love to see this. Mint does something similar by showing you a bar graph and how close you are to filling it up.

jarot540

Simplifi desperately needs a budgeting tool like Mint.

Coach Tappan

@jarot540 I understand what you mean. However, when we surveyed the target group for Simplifi when we were creating it, they were more interested in tracking specific areas of spending, or periods of time, than setting up a comprehensive household budget. Since Quicken now includes a cloud-based mobile component, it might be a better choice for users who want more powerful budget options on the go.

Coach Tappan

But the Feedback section is here so you can tell us what you'd like to see in Simplifi. If enough users agree with you, it might make us reconsider! Thanks for your suggestion!

jarot540

I tried Quicken but it’s honestly terrible on Mac. It doesn’t support multiple banks, etc. I don’t need something special just to be able to knee up with a single page of my income and expenses.

Coach Tappan

@jarot540 I found an existing discussion about adding a more complete budgeting function in Simplifi, and took the liberty of moving your question over here. You're welcome to add your "vote" to this topic, to make sure it's considered. We appreciate your feedback!

jarot540

I vote for this feature.

chanceryder25

I VERY much agree with this thread! After spending about the past hour or two trying to squeeze my relatively normal budget into the "Watch List" and "Savings Goals" features on Simplifi, it just doesn't work well. It's clunky, difficult to see how it all fits together, difficult to see where you are (Mint's progress bars / budget page is pretty great). In my opinion a good budgeting module is a MAKE OR BREAK feature!

chanceryder25

My personal problem with Quicken (which would otherwise be great) is its horrible Mac platform and the fact that its customer service reps seem to have no interest in getting any part of it fixed. I've called to report multiple bugs and errors in the software and they literally try to think of everything they can to say it's not their fault, before they finally admit it's just a problem with the Mac version.

As much as I had problems with Mint.... My fear is that I am going to have to go back to Mint

jarot540

I agree. I may have to cancel Simplifi and go to Mint I’d something doesn’t change soon.

kai4387

I do very much appreciate the current watchlists feature, so I hope that's not going anywhere or changing drastically. I like the idea of tracking spending in specific categories and having a simple historic view. I don't really follow a strict budget, so to me, this is way more useful than Mint's budgeting feature.

For budgeting though, perhaps Simplifi could integrate "watchlists" with the "spending plan" to provide a monthly budget overview with a bit more detail.

jarot540

Yeah...I'm headed back to Mint. Lots of improvements needed here.

Drummon1

Yes, I need the proper budgeting tools like mint. I do like the spending plan concept, but also need to have traditional budgets and how I am progressing. I am trying to do this with watchlist, but I would need a very robust tag filtering capality under watchlist, an annual target for watchlist (budget) and amount remaining. But I'd have so many watch lists then. The bar graphs in Mint make it much easier to visualize. Quicken is way too clunky for the mint crowd to move over. For me, it is not about the cost of Quicken.

jarot540

Yeah...I'm headed back to Mint. Lots of improvements needed here.

chanceryder25

I’m starting to learn how to alter my budgeting style to fit into the Simplifi model. (Starting with income, subtracting away all fixed costs/expenses from the top, and then JUST focusing on discretionary spending). I’m used to seeing it ALL at once that it was a bit strange to me not to be able to see my entire budget at a glance. It’s not my preferred method of budgeting, but I get it and I do think it would probably be preferable to a greater number of people than my way (which is too intricate and detailed for most people).

So I can get on board with the sort of deconstructed budget idea. But that said, the watch list page I think needs some TLC. Because right now if we have say 8 categories of discretionary spending that we want to keep track of, we’re just shown a page full of similar looking large white cards with no distinguishing colors/ordering/etc to help you see your progress on each thing being watched. You have to do mental math to figure out if you’re on the right track, whereas in Mint’s budget you can see at a glance exactly where you are on all of your budgets. I think that’s what we’re missing — the ease of absorption of information from the watch list. Right now it’s not easy to look at the watch list (with many categories) and try to make sense of it all.

Coach Tappan

@chanceryder25 I appreciate you giving our "deconstructed budget" model a try. Thank you for the on-point suggestions on how we might improve our Watchlists presentation to make it easier to see your bigger budget picture at a glance. I'll share these insights with our development team to see if we can incorporate some of them.

Drummon1

In Watchkist, I would also like to be able to quickly see the Total Target for the year (12 x monthly) and remaining for year.

Wooloomooloo2

> @Coach Tappan said:
> @chanceryder25 I appreciate you giving our "deconstructed budget" model a try. Thank you for the on-point suggestions on how we might improve our Watchlists presentation to make it easier to see your bigger budget picture at a glance. I'll share these insights with our development team to see if we can incorporate some of them.

OK I've read this thread, some interesting comments.

Any financial tool aiding tracking and budgeting needs to have a fundamental way of showing whether your planned spending exceeds your planned income. In simplifi, this view is technically impossible to achieve, unless you manually key in all future transactions with some degree of accuracy.

The Spending Plan view does show a nice summary of Bills and Income with 'spent so far' (I really like the graphics for that, very innovative like a graph database) which is nice. What it doesn't show is what you have left to spend overall when taking into account your watch categories. So a simple summary of Bills + Watch Lists + Spent so far - Income would give you a projected balance.

The software is very promising, please don't assume that long-time Quicken users (like me since '98) won't be interested in both products. One for a simple overview that can be shared with family, and the other for all the nit-picky details like payroll information, tax, and years of history. Ironically, Quicken actually doesn't show an Income - Spending view in the budget, something that's always bothered me.

Coach Paco

@Wooloomooloo2 Thank you so much for the feedback you've provided!

mazar1977

I have to agree 100%. Plus, your comment about using Quicken for a FULL budget and that would be great, IF Quicken offered a 100% ONLINE BASED program. The whole reason I use SImplify is because I need something like Quicken that's cloud based without the need for it to connect to a desktop software.

If you guys would actually create a FULL version of Quicken that's web-based then I would gladly pay the full Quicken price (or even more) for it. But all you have is Simplify but then turn around and say "Well if you want full features, use Quicken" This is frustrating to say the least.

Coach Tappan

@mazar1977 Quicken currently includes a cloud-based web implementation with all versions of Quicken at no extra charge, so you should be able to access your Quicken account on the go. More information on this module is available here: https://www.quicken.com/support/quicken-web-frequently-asked-questions

mazar1977

@Coach Tappan I know about that. I have tried using that before I tried Simplify. #1 it still requires that it pulls the info from the desktop software and also it STILL doesn't sync the scheduled transactions correctly (Unless you guys have fixed that recently) Not much point in using Quicken for the Web if its info doesn't match what is in the desktop program its pulling information from