'Spent' Dashboard Card shows Recent Expenses but also Incomes (edited)

SRC54

One thing that has disconcerted me for some time is the card that reads “Spent” From Monday to Today (this changes). It includes incomes so when ever you get paid, it reads something like Spent +$3000 (which jars me anyhow as it seems it ought to be -$3000?

Anyhow, I think the reason for this is that it is analagous to Quicken's Recent Transactions Card. Should it not say “Recent Transaction”? If it's going to be how much one has spent, shouldn't it exclude Income categories?

What do y'all think? I looked for another thread on this subject but didn't find it, so hope I am duplicating.

Coach Natalie

Hello @SRC54,

Thank you for posting to the Community regarding this behavior, although I'm sorry to hear that you're experiencing this issue in Simplifi.

I personally believe that the “Spent” card on the Dashboard (or “Recent Spending” as it's called on the Mobile App) should either not include income transactions, or should be titled something differently like “Recent Transactions” if it is designed to include income transactions.

With that said, however, I am not personally seeing this behavior in Simplifi. I had a couple of interest deposits that came in yesterday that aren't showing on the “Spent” card, and I also just manually created an income transaction that did not show up. Are you noticing the issue with Recurring Income specifically or something along those lines, or do you see all kinds of income transactions included here?

Also, are you seeing the issue on the Simplifi Web App, the Mobile App, or both?

Please let us know so we can best assist!

-Coach Natalie

RobWilk

I had a $1000 deposit yesterday, originally categorized as a spending category (due to it being a reimbursement for spending) but to test changed to an income category, and either category caused it to be included in the “Spent" dashboard section as reported above. This was -not- recurring income. I'm just throwing in a “I see it too” kind of reply.

Coach Natalie

Hello @SRC54 & @RobWilk,

If either of you would like to provide a screenshot of the Dashboard card on both the Mobile App and the Web App, I'd be happy to see what I can find out. 🙂

-Coach Natalie

Flopbot

For what it's worth, I just checked mine after a cleared paycheck deposited and neither includes income - Desktop App ("Spent" Dashboard Card) or Mobile App ("Recent Spending" Dashboard Card). All of the transactions displayed are withdrawals and without doing the actual calculations, the numbers don't appear to be widely off.

RobWilk

@Coach Natalie I'm going to try sending the screenshots by private message, as they include a ‘tax refund’ which might be "sensitive"

Coach Natalie

Thank you @RobWilk!

I think I figured it out due to the comment you made in your DM to me — when testing, I now see that positive transactions that use an Expense Category show in the “Spent” Dashboard card. Based on this behavior, I would strongly assume that this card uses Categories to determine “expenses”, so I think it would be the intended design.

From what I'm seeing, any transactions with an Income Category do not show here, but any with an Expense Category do, regardless of the positive/negative amount.

@SRC54 Is this what you're also seeing?

-Coach Natalie

SRC54

@Coach Natalie @RobWilk and Everyone

Sorry for my late response.

Well, it's a paycheck so doesn't everyone have income: salary minus expenses, e.g., Social Security Tax, State Tax, Health Plan, Retirement plan? So yes, it uses categories.

If it is going to be this way, then I suggest you just rename it Recent Transactions and get rid of the running total.

Thanks for the responses.

SRC54

@Flopbot

So you have a transaction that is a deposit for your paycheck and you put down the gross amount as Salary or Wages and then subtract expenses such as Taxes, Retirement, Health Insurance, and it doesn't show up in your Spent the last 4 days" as a + number?

This happens to me every month. After 4 days, it goes away, of course. I can change the date on my paycheck to five days back, if I want to avoid seeing this. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't.

RobWilk

I tried telling @Coach Natalie if i renamed a positive expense category ("income")to “Personal Income” category, it still showed up in spent.

I'm actually okay with expense categories that have a positive balance effect as ‘spent’ money, because for example, if I charge $10 to buy ‘some product’ then return ‘some product’ for a full refund, I want my spending to reflect $0 net spent for that.

Flopbot

@SRC54 not knowing how you have your paycheck's Recurring Series set up or what you do to the transaction after it appears, I suspect that it might be that you're making the Paycheck's Recurring Series overly complex by trying to track too much info. My personal take is that Simplifi isn't yet built for a high level of complexity when it comes to tracking Paychecks; like what can currently be done with Quicken Desktop. Maybe someday they'll get there but they aint there yet.

Until Simplfi does let us add splits to Recurring Series, I personally am not that concerned about tracking all the details (taxes, social security, healthcare, etc.), I just want everything to work as efficiently - and automatically - as possible. With my current setup, I don't see issues with Income showing up in my Spent Dashboard Card on either desktop or on mobile - at least that I've ever noticed.

Here's how I have my bi-weekly paycheck set up. These are my categories related to my Paycheck…

This is what my Recurring Series look like. The three "Paycheck Withdrawel's are paycheck deductions that get diverted (not transfered) into the various savings goals. All total, every two weeks I see four (4) seperate transaction related to Paychecks.

The only downside that I can think of to my current setup is that since Simplifi doesn't let us edit the base notification amount for Paychecks (see Idea Post here), you end up receiving four (4) seperate notifications every two weeks…I can live with it.

Q's for you:

1. Do you have a Recurring Series set up for your income?
2. Do you edit the split afterwards?
3. If you do split, then what is the type for those individual categories under Setting>Categories (Income or Expense)?
4. Do you really need to split your paycheck? Have you ever needed to reference that info via a report or something in the past year?

If you really do need to split your paycheck for whatever reason, then consider moving any individual categories that are currently Expense to Income.

Sorry if I'm missing some key detail from your original post?

SRC54

@Flopbot

Yes, I want all the detail, and yes I have a recurring, which I split once it is deposited. I had a dummy account for a while where I just did Income, Retirment Deposits, payroll taxes and health plan separately. I decided not to do that any more. I decided to use the Spending Plan instead. This behavior then is normal for Simplifi, but not done correctly.

Simplifi needs to handle transfers and income/expenses in the same transaction. If necessary we should have control over ignoring parts of the transactions.

Thanks for taking the time in clarifying. Just wanted to make sure that the behavior I see in Simplifi is same for everyone. And it apparently is.

SRC54

@RobWilk Yes, I agree that when we get refunds, we take it away from what we spent. And we want that to be reflected. But basically that is negative expense. I understand that and agree.

But the 4-day spending card that reflects a paycheck provides a useless tally, which doesn't illuminate spending. I can live with it, but it's not how it should be. Income categories should not be reflected in a spending graph/card, etc.

When my wife goes on a business trip, she gets one reimbursement check for travel and meals + mileage. Since there is only one check, I do the deposit transaction as Travel (negative expense), Meals (negative expense) and Mileage (Non-taxable Income). I do this because she has already charged her credit card for those things, so this will zero out the expense. The mileage then gets totaled in the Spending Card. If they had given two checks, it wouldn't be a problem. Again, I just live with it. It only amounts to $200. Monthly paycheck is a bigger matter.

All of this could be done with a payable/receivable account, of course. And I've done that, but over time that complicates rather than simplifies. But about a month ago, I decided to redo everything and simplify. To me the simpler thing is to do a split.

Simplifi does the accounting right, and that's the bottom line. How much money is left over is right in the Spending Plan even though sometimes I think the way it is laid out could be better. The same is true here in Dashboard. Having +3700 spending displayed is disconcerting. It would be true if that were because of a refund, but it's not true when it's because you got paid. There ought to be a way to fix that.

Thanks for clarifying your experience as we have now answered @Coach Natalie ‘s question. It’s this way for everyone, which is what I thought.

P.S. In testing this, I have created lots of dummy transactions. And it doesn't matter rather one ignores the transactions in reports and/or Spending Plan, it shows up in the Dashboard Spending Plan anyhow. Not that it would be feasible to ignore your paycheck in the Spending Plan. I just thought that was interesting. So this card is independent of Spending Plan and Reports. That's not true of Top Spending Categories and the Income/Expense Bar Graphs. I thought that was interesting! Bug or feature?

Coach Natalie

Hello @SRC54,

Yes, I believe that the “Spent” Dashboard card is based on Categories, and I'm wondering if the reason you're seeing split paycheck transactions here is because they include Expense Categories. Maybe next time you receive a paycheck, check the Spent card before and after splitting the transaction to see if it makes a difference and to try and narrow down the behavior.

I agree with @RobWilk that having a reimbursement where you're using an Expense Category for a positive transaction would be important to include here so you have an accurate net total. The only issue I was seeing last week is with editing a positive transaction that had an Expense Category to have an Income Category, it was still showing in the ‘Spent’ card.

This does not seem to be the case today, however; my tax refund was deposited and Simplifi auto-categorized it as “Federal Tax”, which is an Expense Category. It showed up on the Spent card, but as soon as I edited the transaction and changed the Category to “Personal Income”, the transaction no longer showed on ‘Spent’. I tested with another positive transaction and saw the same result. I think Simplifi was being quirky last week.

@SRC54 Let us know how it goes when performing the above-mentioned testing with your next paycheck transaction and we can go from there. 🙂

-Coach Natalie

RobWilk

If the expense category is the problem, and we're dealing with payroll taxes, could @SRC54 create ‘income’ categories for each tax witholding -but- store negative (expense) values in there — would that resolve the issue? i.e. create ‘social security payroll tax’ as an income category, and use that to split up the paycheck?

SRC54

@RobWilk If I used income categories, it would be negative income, and that would keep it out of Spent. But Health Plan is an expense category too. I think it could work, but I would rather not. The ultimate solution is to reprogram the Spent transactions to just ignore income categories altogether and just count expense categories. My workaround is to enter the paycheck and once it clears, to set it back 5 days. The Spent Card only tallies the past 4-5 days anyhow. It doesn't really make any difference to the Spending Plan if my paycheck, actually my wife's, is put on the 26 instead of the 31.

@Coach Natalie I've done enought entering of dummy transactions to know that the income categories always get counted in the Spent Card. It's just the way it is programmed. Thanks for the suggestion. My Social Security check right now is right as it's pure income, but once my wife retires, they will take Medicare Part B out of it, and i will have a split transaction with it too. And it will show up as a negative Expense in the Spent Card. And yes, I had my state refund set up as an income so it didn't appear, but since I owed the Feds, it was in my Spent amount. Thankfully, I didn't owe much.

This happened because I decided to stop doing a Receivable account for the paycheck and just do a split transaction in my Checking Account. It's a trade-off.

Also, I changed my notification settings in the community so I should be able to respond more quickly here on out.

Thanks.

Coach Natalie

Hello @SRC54,

You can always create an Idea post requesting that the ‘Spent’ Dashboard card be based on Amounts (positive vs negative) as opposed to Categories. 🙂

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/998/creating-and-voting-for-ideas-in-the-community

-Coach Natalie

SRC54

@Coach Natalie I will do that. I would like the Spent Card on the Dashboard to just count Expense categories and ignore income categories.

RobWilk

@Coach Natalie I think I found a bug with respect to this

1. If I create an INCOME category transaction, it does not show up in spent as expected
2. But if i create it as an EXPENSE category, yes, it does show up in spent, but then if i CHANGE the category to an income category, it still shows up in spent even though it is an income category.

Here's an example dummy transaction in spent after step 2 above

SRC54

@RobWilk Did you refresh the browser? I tried it and at first it didn't go away, but it did after a refresh. I find sometimes with Chromium, I have to sign out and back in to get it to update.

I tried it, and once I got it to refresh, it was right. So far for me, it is only wrong when I have split transactions that include income and expenses (or transfers).

Thanks for testing.

RobWilk

@SRC54 You're right, refreshing the page does “solve” this mini-bug. That tells me the problem I described is more in the client side ("javascript" or whatever) code as opposed to a server-side problem. I apologize if this is not the same problem you were reporting, i didn't intend to hijack your topic.

SRC54

@RobWilk No need for apology. This is how we learn by doing. I have discovered a lot of things by trial and error. It happens in Chorome and sometimes in Safari. It mostly occurs in the Spending Plan and Spent card on the Dashboard. It seems to refresh fine in the “Top Spending Categories” card. I've notified support.

SRC54

This doesn't solve the paycheck problem, but I did decide that Credit Card Rewards really isn't income, but a rebate, so I moved it from an Income category to an expense category, namely Collateral:Rebates. Of course, the transaction now shows up as a negative expense, which is fine since it did decrease my spending.

FWIW, my Collateral category includes things that don't fit easily in just one category but go across categories such as Personal, Home, Extras. My subcategories are Fees, Life Insurance, Shipping, Apps, Surtax (Sales Tax) and now Rebates.

I used to put Sales Tax in taxes, but it is really just a non-deductible surcharge since State Income Tax is larger and you can just deduct one of them. I wouldn't even categorize it except most of the time I buy items at the store that go into multiple categories, e.g., Home:Supplies and Basics:Food. And at Amazon, it could be anything. Really, in AL, it's the stores that pay the tax. They just put it on our bill to show us approximately how much it costs. I wish they would just include it in the price. It's just another cost of doing business and so part of their overhead. They get to deduct it.

There's excise taxes on our phone bill and there is a utility tax in AL that the Water, Sewer, Power and Gas Bill show but I just put the total amount down as Home:Utilities since, of course, we cannot deduct it. They pay it. I suppose it is good for us to see how much this adds to our bills.

For those in other states, when you hear that Alabama has low taxes, let me assure you they ADD up. We have every sort of tax known to man, a vestige of our days before WWII when we were a Progressive state. The rhetoric has changed but the taxes remain! :)

Flopbot

Interesting, I just had a tax refund clear that downloaded with an 'Expense Category' which should have - in my mind - had an 'Income Category'. Originally, it appeared on the Recent Spending Dashboard Card and when I fixed it, it disappeared. Confirming @Coach Natalie 's comment from March 3rd.

SRC54

Yes, @Flopbot I struggled with tax refunds. For now, I have it as a Negative Expense in Federal Taxes. It decreased my taxes for March 2023. I tagged it with Tax Refund tag (I also made it a one-time bill so it wouldn't throw off my spending plan). I also have Extra Tax Payment tag and a Taxes Owed tag. I put all of them in Federal Taxes category. Because of increase in bank interest rates, I will be having to send the IRS extra tax payments. A good problem to have but irritating since they will charge you a penalty if you owe too much when you file your taxes. I've had people tell me this isn't true any longer but it happened once to me back in the heyday of the 1990s. You can also avoid it by making a last minute IRA deposit, but I am getting long in the tooth for that.