Ignore Investment Transactions from the Spending Plan by default (edited)

millsmn

I would like to request that Investment Transactions be ignored from the Spending Plan by default (as it was in the mobile app version 4.2) with the ability to select to ignore or include investment transactions by account and transaction.

jtjones0304

I would agree excluding by default. This was suddenly disruptive from its previous behavior.

Fadiest

I noticed that investments transaction are included in the spending plan and I agree there should be an option to remove that. This has created a lot of confusion in my plan. I have a lot of transactions over months and it would be very labor intensive to go over each one and set it to be ignored from reporting.

Coach Natalie

Hello All,

Great news! For the Investment Transactions that can now be included in the Spending Plan (which are just non-investing/"cash flow" types at this time), these items will be ignored by default. This change is expected to take place within the next couple of weeks and should resolve a lot of the issues our users are seeing with Investment Transactions in the Spending Plan.

I hope this helps!

-Coach Natalie

millsmn

Great News Natalie - looking forward to the update.

SRC54

@Coach Natalie

Just to clarify, you'll still be able to include the cash flow/deposits in your spending plan if you like; you just have to unclick the ignore, correct?

Coach Natalie

Correct, @SRC54. 🙂

-Coach Natalie

SRC54

@Coach Natalie

I was pretty sure that is what you meant, but it scared me after having changed spending plans going back to 2021. The main problem I think is that, and I know it's true of Fidelity, downloads shows buys and reinvestments as deposits instead of investment transactions. I go through each month and manually edit these, but I have only 14 transactions per month (turning them into 7 reinvestments) and deleting the other 7, and deleting them again when they re-download. I know some on here have 30-40 of these transactions.

One thing nice would be to add Exclude/Include in Reports, Spending Plan toggle" for bulk editing. I have also thought of just deleting investment transactions altogether since Simplifi doesn't really look at these transactions in the calculations of shares, holdings, and balances. With Simplifi's philosophy of working backwards from downloaded balances, I don't think it could be any other way. So it is just for record purposes.

SRC54

@DannyB and @Coach Natalie Yesterday and today Schwab downloaded dividends and buy correctly in the Roth IRA. By that, I mean that they were NOT Deposits/Payments but Investments, one Dividend Income and one Buy. This is the first time this has happened, and shows that Simplifi is working on this. So automatically, they are hidden from Reports and Spending Plan.

I await to see if this change also happens with Fidelity when I get my monthly dividends on Friday night. I expect it may take some time for it to show up in every Brokerage Account, and, of course, it's possible that Schwab made a change.

There is progress being made so hang in there Danny.

DannyB

@SRC54 that's great news. I just checked my accounts and the picture is not completely clear yet but it appears that all my Charles Schwab accounts (these are custodial accounts for the g-kids and a personal (mirror) account) seem to be sorted properly by Simplifi assigning appropriate Action, Security/Payee, Description/Category, etc. The exception for Charles Schwab seems to be the monthly deposits I make into each account where there appears to be some confusion in Simplifi in what to do with these. This problem seems to be the result of the recent complete transfer of all accounts from TD Ameritrade to Charles Schwab in May (Another buy out, take over, absorption of a "little firm" by a bigger firm!) I'll work on making sure these recurring transfers are set up properly to see if that helps.

On the other hand, Simplifi can't seem to sort out the data downloads from BNY | Mellon Pershing (another take over!) but hopefully this will get resolved as the Investment module improves over time.

Leonard Simmons

has this been implemented yet? I have removed my investment accounts for the time being but would like to include them without having to maintain all the transactions and removals from the spending plan, etc.

SRC54

@DannyB

It looks like they are making progress. The deposit you make each month ought to be a transfer, such as from a bank account to Schwab, which will be used in turn to make a Buy. The transfer ought to be ignored automatically in the Spending Plan. I make a transfer from my Brokerage to Checking each month, and it is ignored. Also, when I make an IRA contribution from Checking to IRA, it is ignored as well.

The problem I have is getting them to match. Usually if I have created a transfer and then the transfer is downloaded later, I just delete the manual one. We don't yet have Merge in the Investment accounts. I assume it is coming.

DannyB

Thanks for.the insights.Yes, these are transfers and have been ignored. In May, all TD Ameritrade accounts were transfered to Charles Schawb and TD was shut down. My xfers were all set up to go to TD and now I have to re do them all to go to CS. But, all transaction history was also transfered and now I have a bunch of "Pending" deposit transactions that don't have a transfered from account.

I'm just going to have to fiddle around with these accounts until I figure out what can be done though it's not a big deal since as you point out, Simplifi only deals with current balance and share counts and not the nitty gritty of all the transactions.

I have always had these accounts ignored in Simplifi since this is all funds we are gifting to our g-kids. I think once the recurring xfers get memorized by Simplifi it will all be copacetic since Simplifi seems to be handling the CS transactions just fine.

Coach Natalie

Hello All,

Great news — it appears that this has been implemented for both Reports and the Spending Plan! I believe the expected behavior at this point is that Investment Accounts will be excluded by default. From there, even if the account is set to be included, the individual transactions will be excluded by default. However, the accounts and/or transactions can be included manually per a user's preference.

We hope this gives everyone what they're looking for!

-Coach Natalie

Coach Natalie

Here's an article that goes over the new design for Investment Transaction visibility!

https://help.simplifimoney.com/en/articles/8241194-visibility-updates-for-investment-transactions

-Coach Natalie