Have Recurring Payments be tied to the budget itself rather than individual accounts

Klaxwave

Because recurring payments have to be associated with an account, deleting the account also deletes the recurring payments. This is miserable, especially when I was first starting out and needing to fix mistakes that I made with putting in new accounts by deleting the old account (or when I close an account that had recurring payments attached to it), because it means that I have to remember and re-enter every recurring payment each time. It would be ideal if I could just have my recurring payments saved in my budget so they'll remain even if the accounts associated with them disappear - the payments still gotta get paid somehow, after all.

I spoke about this with Coach Victor, who mentioned that on the back end, Simplfi would get messed up trying to hold onto transactions that aren't tied to an account. I think one solution would be to put up an alert when deleting an account that has recurring payments saying "This account has recurring payments associated with it. You will need to reassign them to different accounts," giving the user the chance to immediately address the issue rather than having to fix everything after the fact. Victor also suggested having a manual account for “Uncategorized Recurring Payments” that orphaned payments can be kicked to, sort of like sort of like how transactions will get kicked into "uncategorized" if something weird happens.

papermuffins

Agreed. Seems more like a bug that you're able to delete an account that has active recurring items linked to it. It should certainly check, then prompt the user with a list of the recurring items and provide them a dropdown to reassociate them to a different debiting account before deleting the account.

RobWilk

If I have a recurring charge on credit card A, and close credit card A, that charge doesn't mysteriously start charging to another credit card. One would think they would move the reminder account when they update the billing for that account.

I'm curious though, does this happen when you ‘delete’ or ‘close’ an account or both?

Klaxwave

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/14002#Comment_14002

I'm coming at this from the perspective of a new user of Simplifi who was wrestling with what accounts I want have linked to my banks and what accounts I wanted to track manually (and as far as I can tell, when an account is set to manual, it cannot after the fact be linked, meaning my only choice was to delete the account and remake it), so it's not that literal billing was changing, but merely how my budget was representing that billing.

I have to admit, I didn't know there was a distinction between deleting and closing - when I ended my card, I just deleted the account from Simplifi.

RobWilk

@Klaxwave To clarify - when you ‘close’ an account, the transactions are preserved and they still show up in your reports (if selected), when you delete you're removing all history associated with that account.

You may have figured that out on your own, but i thought i'd clarify just in case.

Unfortunately, right now when you close an account, it still shows it in the account list, you cannot yet ‘hide’ an account (open or closed) though i think that's on the way.

Klaxwave

I appreciate the heads up @RobWilk! I'm still trying to get my hands around the particulars of Simplifi, so any help is appreciated.

Coach Natalie

Hello @Klaxwave,

Thanks for posting your suggestion to the Community!

Since deleting an account deletes all of the transaction activity associated with the account, I can see how Simplifi would also delete the associated Recurring Series, as they are essentially “transactions”. However, I agree that Simplifi should at least provide some form of warning or something along those lines.

With that said, I'm not sure what the intended design is, but I do think this Idea post is a good starting point. I will also attempt to find out for sure so our Support Articles on deleting accounts can be updated to reflect this information if applicable.

Also, for future reference, you can connect manual accounts and would not need to delete and re-add them to do so. To connect a manual account, you'd just go through the Add Account flow, connect to your bank, and then link the account(s) found to your existing Simplifi accounts. More details on this can be found here.

I hope this helps!

-Coach Natalie