Advice on splitting paychecks between accounts?

benk

I'm not sure how best to structure my Simplifi setup — would love any advice.

I have 2 bank accounts — one for Bills/subscriptions and one for Discretionary spending.

I get a paycheck every 2 weeks.

Paychecks get deposited into the Bills account and all my automatic expenses trickle out of there.

The second paycheck of each month is where my Discretionary money comes from. I transfer (via Zelle) a sum out of Bills account and into Discretionary account.

How should I structure this in Simplifi?

Simplifi thinks of the transfer as both an expense (-$X00 from Bills account) and income (+$X00 to Discretionary account), which makes my expenses and income both look much higher than they are.

Is there a trick or tool for managing interplay between accounts so they level out?

DannyB

If you have this transfer categorized as a Transfer it should be a wash in Simplifi. Here is a support article about how transfers work in Simplifi.

https://help.simplifimoney.com/en/articles/3352152-how-do-transfers-work

Once you get the transfer set up properly in Simplifi it shouldn't affect your actual income and expenses.

When you set up this transfer make sure your categorize it as a transfer to the receiving account. Category>Transfer>[name of account you transfer to]

Any transactions categorized as a transfer will automatically be excluded from bot Reports and the Spending Plan as seen in this transaction detail for one of my transfers.

This should take care of your issue with these transfers messing up your income and expense numbers.

Hope that helps.

Flopbot

@benk , here's how I handle mine.

The original paychecks coming in only have one side in Simplifi so I have them saved as a Recurring Series like this.

Any money that's being split out BEFORE it hits my bank account - and being deposited into a Saving Account - has a Recurring Series set up like this.

Once the money is in your Bills Account, then transferring it to another account connected to Simplifi should be net neutral by default like Danny said. Although, recently, Simplifi gave us the ability to adjust the Exclusions on both ends of the transaction. This can be done on the transaction itself or in Recurring Series.

It's important to note that @DannyB understands the Spending Plan much, much better than I; I've been focused on other things as more important to my sanity. At some point, I really want to do a deep dive into Simplifie's Spending Plan, but with my current understanding, I haven't noticed any oddities or over/under counting of anything in my Spending Plan. This setup seems to have worked well for over a year.

benk

Thanks, both of you! Nearly figured out my setup.