We want your feedback on the Spending Plan!
Comments
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They need to fix this issue. You should be able to rollup child categories!!!
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@Max1223 - correct on too simple. If I used only projected other spending with no planned spending, I will use watchlists with targets on it that add up to the total other projected spending amount. The watchlists allow me to add multiple sub categories or even tags on a tile.
@Coach Natalie - will the spending plan alert a user if they are over their projected other spending for a given month?
Simplifi User Since Nov 2023
Minter 2014-2023
Questionable Excel before 2014 to present
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@UrsulaA @Coach Natalie I find myself using Watchlist more as well. It includes a target line, 12 month average and view and includes known coming bills and payments so no surprises at end of month. Yes, I wish the Spending Plan had the flexibility of the Watchlist. The one thing about the watchlist is the way it calculates Projected spend, the math isn't realistic. Personally, I would just leave off Projected unless Quicken could find better algorithms that better predict your future spend.
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Yes I use this too. However it is notable that once the month begins, that number completely disappears and is replaced by your actual spending. So on Jan 1, you'll be at $0.00 just as if you had never used it (feb forward will still have values). It won't be telling you that you have spent $47/600 discretionary dollars which I think is what a lot of us want.
What might work better, with minimal change on their end, is allowing multi-category selection in the Planned spending. I can say I plan to spend an extra $500 a month, but it wont consistantly be in the same area. One month its home furnishings, the next month its electronics, the next month its travel, etc. If I could just group all those random categories together into a discretionary bucket it would go a long way.
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@Wedo778 - It is a bummer that the projection does not stick for comparison with actual in the other spending area.
I agree, the multi category selection in planned spending will alleviate the need to track spending to a target. I rather be able to lump all my discretionary categories (entertainment, personal care) into one tile instead of having multiple. It will make the release at end of month process more efficient as there will be less tiles to go through. I do like the net total in the spending plan matching the net income in reports.
I also found a way to track my projected other spending total. I added targets to a few of my watchlists to match that total. I can work with that. I do not recall Mint having a feature to target everything else in its budget, so this is an improvement.
Simplifi User Since Nov 2023
Minter 2014-2023
Questionable Excel before 2014 to present
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@UrsulaA Yea I do the same. And then I also have a redundant "everything" watchlist to see my overall spending averages since Simplifi doesn't have rollups.
And yea there are some improvements over Mint. Like forecasting, I missed that dearly when I switched from Microsoft Money to Mint and have been doing it in a spreadsheet for the last decade.
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@Wedo778 - Microsoft Money! I used that in the mid 2000s, then switched to Excel, and briefly used Quicken (now Quicken Classic Deluxe). After that, I used Mint since 2014.
I like the forecasting too. I will add an everything watchlist to see my overall spending averages as the reports only add up totals. The bubbles on the spending plan other spending section are kind of cute.
Simplifi User Since Nov 2023
Minter 2014-2023
Questionable Excel before 2014 to present
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Seconding everybody calling for rollovers; if that's too complicated to implement, a partial solution could be to have the option "Release to Savings Goal" at the end of the month, rather than to general spending. (For instance, if I spend $250 instead of $300 on gas one month, I can automatically put that money into a "Gas Overflow" savings goal with one or two clicks instead of manually setting the savings goal contribution every time.)
As for other features/abilities, it might already be there and I just haven't found it, but I wish there was a way to "unrelease" money if you release it too soon. I.e., I've spent $200 on groceries out of my $300 budget by the 25th of the month, and I'm not planning to go to the grocery store again until next week, so I release that $100 to general spending. Then on the 28th, I'm at the pharmacy and notice they have a great deal on seltzer, so I stock up, and spend $40. I have plenty of money in general spending still, but because I've released the $100 to General that should have been Groceries, it now shows the Groceries category as $40 over.
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I think this particular feature was an attempt to do zero-budgeting like some apps do (YNAB) where you set your income for the month, then account for where every dollar will go (same with Dave Ramsey's EveryDollar). That's why Simplifi wants you to "do something with it" at the end. It doesn't work well for the folks like me who are just trying to set budget limits. That's why I use watchlists instead for the categories I view this way.
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- How would you use rollover abilities in the Spending Plan?
I would use rollover to "build up" fund to use for restaurants, etc. I also have come from Mint recently and used rollover to track allowance funds for my kids. I think I just used it for several things—gas too. Some months we travel more than others and so the gas/fuel rollover helped even things out.
- How would having rollover abilities benefit you?
It would just make it so much simpler to track funds while budgeting.
- What other features/abilities would you like to see added to the Spending Plan?
I would like to see the option of budgeting for expenses that are less than monthly—e.g., I pay all my insurance (auto, home) annually, magazine subscriptions, and even subscriptions to some streaming services since it's cheaper to pay once a year. In Mint I was able to indicate how frequently an expense would happen, and then it would automatically break it down per month to account for in my monthly budget. Then, the month that the bill was due, it would show how much had been built up in that category and make it available for spending without it seeming like I had to reduce other categories to still meet my budget. It was brilliant.
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I do a monthly summary spreadsheet that my husband and I review; it works to keep us on the same page with our spending and goals. Simplifi has helped me significantly with this, actually better than Mint in many cases. And the YTD totals in Watchlists, OMG I love this.
Simplifi handles Planned Spending as one amount - the total of all the expenses I've added. An overage in one expense is indicated with ! in red and the overage amount is added to total. However, at the beginning of the next month, Simplify could show me a total of my true spend for the month prior. Once the month is over, I can't spend any more so how did I do? It's this total that we discuss and it determines did we stay on budget. And over time, if I'm constantly over (or under), it's time to adjust the budget.
Bottom line, any time I'm making calculations on my own, I wonder why the app can't do it for me.
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If I'm reading correctly, what you essentially want is rollovers which a lot of us are requesting. So that your overage or underage rolls to the next month's budget and auto-adjusts what you have available to spend. Its reportedly in progress but not there today.
What I do to compensate is I have created matching Watchlists. These don't do the exact same thing, but they do show me a YTD total and a 12 month average spend. So those are other useful ways to know if over a long period I am on budget or need to adjust. Its just not as immediate as "I really should only eat out once this month because I ate out so often last month".
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Not really. But there seem to be a number of places where there are totals and averages, why not in last month’s plan?
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There is a monthly summary report (Reports>Monthly Summary) but I’m pretty sure it’s not what you are looking for.
Danny
Simplifi user since 01/22
”Budget: a mathematical confirmation of your suspicions.” ~A.A. Latimer0 -
It's ridiculous to not have a rollover feature. Imagine you forced me to tell you my budget on a daily basis with no rollover - crazy, right? You essentially are telling me to fix my budget on a monthly basis, when I know that sometimes I'm over or under. What I care is how, over time, I'm spending. Suppose I spend $100 under this month and$$100 over next month. I'm fine. But if I spend $1000 over this month and $100 under next month I'm not fine. Don't force me to redo my budget every single month.
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I wouldn't use the Rollover spending. I like that I can set up spending for certain categories. Can I mark transactions per category? I want to know how it was able to come up with $380.00/month for Groceries. That is higher than normal for my grocery spending.
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Can someone explain why implementing a rollover feature is so difficult? Seems to me it should only be a few lines of code.
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Are you a software app developer to be able to know for sure? I agree that the Simplifi team could provide more color on the delay of the feature's launch as well as on how they prioritize requests.
The new Simplifi users coming from Mint have expressed their desire for the rollover budget feature. I am a former Minter, and I did not use the rollover budget much. I used it to allocate a budget for an annual expense or other odds and ends.
Simplifi User Since Nov 2023
Minter 2014-2023
Questionable Excel before 2014 to present
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I will also like to see the recurring reminders for credit card payments/transfers update with the statement balance for me to pay in full when due. I voted for this feature request already.
Simplifi User Since Nov 2023
Minter 2014-2023
Questionable Excel before 2014 to present
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For example, rollover didn't previously exist for the last 5 years or however long Quicken Simplifi has been around, let's say the feature shows up in January of 2024, do they roll over starting from when the product launched forward to today? So let's say there was $5,000/month income with an average of $1000 leftover, all of a sudden the current month has $1000x12monthx5 years = $60,000 worth of extra money in the spending plan? Will there need to be an option to turn off rollover either altogether or for a particular month (i.e. reset what was rolled in starting at month x). Then comes the matter of how you fit this new rollover information (and options) into a limited display space that is already crowded (for many people, including myself, we need to zoom out in the browser to see everything that's on the screen now, and they've got to find a place to add more stuff to the screen, and make it look pretty at that). OH, and there's the fact that anything hidden from the spending plan will make it look long term like you have much more money than you do.
I'm not a developer for Quicken, so I'm sure they have a much longer list of things they would love to answer your question with, but they probably won't because that might get them fired (leaking company secrets, etc.)
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Rob Wilkens0 -
It would work for me if there was just simply another item in "Income after bills & savings" that is "Rollover" that would maintain a running amount that is added to from the prior month (either credit or debit). The user could always just change the amount if they need to adjust it or initiate it with a given amount. The pie "Available" would reflect this adjusted amount.
This isn't on a per-category level, but I think it handles most of the use cases, and it's straight forward.
In fact, I think this way is superior to Mint since money left over from a category contributes to an increase in total available funds, which Mint could not do.
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You summed my concern about rollover up. I do not want to spend money I do not have if I keep rolling over balances left to spend for several years.
For the rollover to work without rolling over extra money forever, a user will need to set up an annual budget for categories were the feature will be used or a limit on how much to rollover per year as @RockLee suggested. I will set up an annual target of $1000 for dining and drinks and ensure that balances I roll over do not exceed my annual spend.
Simplifi User Since Nov 2023
Minter 2014-2023
Questionable Excel before 2014 to present
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@nanoviking Here are some thoughts why changes are rarely as simple as they seem.
Anthony Bopp
Simplifi User Since July 2022Money talks. But all my paycheck ever says is goodbye6 -
I'd like to be able to choose which spending plan categories have rollover. That also solves the "what to do about historical data" issue since by default, all spending plans would have the option set to off.
Another approach would be that at the end of a month, let me see which categories I went over/under, and have an option to release those extra (or negative) funds towards next month's spending plan. Along with that it might be nice to have an option to use that same choice for future months.
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Yes this would be a good solution to the infuriating insistence that we are required to "close out" a month. Give us the choice to roll over or not roll over any outstanding amount to the next month's plan.
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They already have a manual "release unused funds" option on the spending plan. It wouldn't be complicated to give option to add remaining balance to the following months available spend.
However, my guess is that doing so could interfere with the fundamental structure of how the software processes income. It wouldn't be hard to automatically route remaining balance to an "excess income " bucket and then allow future categories to draw from both that and new income (while passing the remaining category balance forward month). But idk how this app is structured.
I get your point and agree with you, but I'm still flummoxed as to why a solution hasn't been developed in the last several years. Feels like even with all of the testing necessary it should be straightforward to implement in some capacity, even as a beta feature, if devs just prioritized the work.
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Ultimately, the point of rollovers is to align budget with longer term goals (typically annual) and enable tracking of spend/save progress at particular sampling intervals (typically monthly) . I can see how this kind of goes against the grain of the Simplifi philosophy, but long term budget goals and progress tracking should still be a well supported feature of any mature budgeting application.
As many others have pointed out, Simplifi has the "savings goal" feature, but the "savings goal" is clunky to use. It lacks automated integration with spend plan and transactions. Using the "savings goal" for long term budgeting is also a bit of a misnomer because the goal in this case would be to be at $0 balance in the goal at year end.
I'd be happy to use "savings goals" for my annual gift/clothing/vacation etc. budgets if it was easier interact with. But currently, it's impractical to make monthly hacky manual adjustments to use the "savings goal" this way.
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I use Savings Goals and like the concept of it. Especially that it sets aside money from any account I select. @nanoviking you can set a date for when the goal ends, so it doesnt have to be end of the year. Since I havent gone through a cycle yet, I'd like to think Simplifi would ask if I'd like to reset the goal once complete.
Manually adding money the goal works for me as it mimics how I would use a savings account or piggy back. Here is where Savings Goals can improve, Simplifi can automate the Add with a confirmation from my end. Much like setting up a monthly rule to add money to savings, I just select OK or make some adjustments before the transaction happens. This is a nice to have for me. The larger issue is manually removing the money, while it mimics real life is what I feel is lacking in that I can't tag an actual transaction to reduce the amount of savings. If Simplifi could add this, Savings Goals would be great and likely eliminate the need for rollovers for me. It seems all the data is there to do this. Earmarked money, Accounts, Goals tab, Goals in the Saving Plan, the actual expense transaction. Not saying it's easy to do but…
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