Prescheduled, one-time Transfers (e.g. Credit Card Payments)
Hi all,
I have been doing my best to budget not just my spending, but also cash flows, to ensure that credit cards aren't closing with a high balance. The "cash flow" widget at the top of the transactions page has been incredibly helpful for this.
If I add a manual, future-dated transfer, it shows the credit to the CC account and debit to my checking so I can track my projected balances on particular days, which is amazing. However, there are a few gaps. It could be user error, but after chatting with a few coaches, I ended up with some validation and a few weird workarounds
In contrast, recurring transfers tend to work very well from the spending plan and almost always link correctly.
When I add a future-dated transfer as a transaction instead of a series, I have very mixed results. Some examples:
- Sometimes the imported bank/card transactions show in addition to the original transaction. This isn't so bad since I can merge them, but I would rather not have to do that, or have my account balances show negative until I finish merging.
- If I delete the future-dated transaction, sometimes it won't download the real transaction.
- Other times, one side (bank downloaded) will end up linked to the a manual transaction on the other.
That said, I have three separate requests:
#1: Reminders for one-time transfers.
I would like the option to add a 'reminder' for a transfer, similar to a bill. This should remain excluded from the spending plan, but should reflect in the cash flow projections for both the source and destination accounts. It should also attempt to match to downloaded transactions, rather than being treated as a manual transaction.
#2: Non-instant transfer handling
Another piece of functionality that could be improved is that the way the system handles non-instant transfers —basically, any time you could use a "money in transit" account.
It seems like in some (but not all?) cases, Simplifi forces both sides of a transfer to have identical dates and syncs the "cleared" status. This causes historical problems in the cash flow/running balance for the days between, e.g. if an account applies a payment before it is withdrawn from your checking.
#3: Better control when trying to 'detangle' transactions
In short, I want another option on the pop-up when a linked transaction will be deleted that says "Keep, but set to uncategorized."
If one side of a transfer (including recurring ones, in this case) ends up mismatched, deleting or recategorizing it will prompt to either delete (manual transactions) or remove the category from (bank downloaded) the other side.
I thought this would be good, but based on my experience so far (and a few chats with coaches), that manual-but-deleted transaction can cause Simplifi to not download the real transactions from the bank if it detects a duplicate. The end result is that I don't have any transaction on one side of the transfer, and have to add additional manual transactions all over again to balance my accounts. I'd rather have a little more control here. It's much easier to fix an "uncategorized" transaction than to have to add one from scratch.
Comments
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Hello @MichaelW,
Thanks for sharing your feedback and suggestions with the Community!
When it comes to duplicate transactions, if one of the transactions is manually entered and the other is bank-downloaded, Simplifi just didn't match the downloaded transaction to the manual one at the time of download. The best way to resolve this, and to help teach Simplifi, is to manually merge them, which it sounds like you're doing.
In regards to deleted manually-entered transactions not downloading, this should not be occurring. The only time a deleted transaction won't download is if it's being re-downloaded; i.e. a deleted downloaded transaction will not download again. With that said, if you're seeing missing transactions in Simplifi, I'd suggest reviewing the troubleshooting steps found here, and then posting to the applicable area of the Community to outline and report the problem if it persists.
Finally, as for your requests, if you'd like to see these gain traction, you'll want to create Idea posts so other users can vote on your ideas, and our Product Team can review them. You'll want to create a separate Idea post for each individual suggestion.
I hope this helps!
-Coach Natalie
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Thanks, Natalie!
I definitely had some missed downloads in a couple cases, but I must've misunderstood my conversations with the coaches at the time. I thought they were the ones who suggested that the manual transactions I'd created/deleted could've affected the download.
That said, I dug into it a little bit more and it seems #2, but a little more complex, was root of the issues. Most of the other problems were me trying to work around it.
When 2 bank-downloaded transactions are linked, Simplifi respects the dates and status of both sides. However, if the two bank-downloaded transactions are merged with a manual transaction, which is itself linked, Simplifi will lock both sides of the transaction into a "cleared" status and match the dates of the manual transaction. This causes balance 'inflation' in the checking side, since it's trying to calculate the daily balance backwards from the bank balance, as if the charge had posted. After testing, both transactions are locked into "cleared" even if both sides of the bank-downloaded transaction are "pending"—I tested in a savings-to-checking transfer, which caused both balances to be off in Simplifi.
Should I consider that an idea, or a bug?
I'll go ahead and create an idea for #3 because I would still find it very helpful.
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Hello @MichaelW,
Thanks for posting back!
We had a post regarding similar behavior here, however, the testing was done with manually created transactions, which is where the linked transfer was created from, so it doesn't seem to match up fully with what you're seeing. If you'd like to create a new post to report the issue as a bug, we can certainly take a closer look. Please capture an outline of what exactly occurs and when and provide specific examples. 🙂
-Coach Natalie
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