nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Ability to include any/all Investment Transaction in Reports and the Spending Plan (edited)

cmordas

I saw in an earlier thread that investment income is not included / can't be included in income for reporting and tracking purposes. This renders Simplifi pretty useless to me. As a retiree those numbers are an important part of my monthly income. [removed - no soliciting]

Find more posts tagged with

Active

Investments

Spending Plan

Reports

Feature Request

Status: Active

Comments

Coach Natalie

Hello @cmordas,

Thanks for sharing your feedback with the Community!

When viewing the "Dividend Income" Type for Investment Transactions in Simplifi, I see that the 'exclude from reports and spending plan' options are available, however, I don't see the actual transactions included in any Reports or the Spending Plan. I'm not sure if they intend to allow these Types to be included, or if the options will eventually become grayed out like other Investing Types, but I went ahead and turned this into an Idea post so other users can vote on it and our Product Team can review it.

I'll be sure to update this post as soon as any news becomes available!

-Coach Natalie

Marc F

Selected investment transactions and/or accounts should be able to be added to income, spending and reports. Currently those options are grayed out.

minx

Yeah I'm confused why dividends and interest in investment accounts would NOT be considered income, since I can take any of this out any time, no different than cash from a bank account. I've manually adjusted ALL investment accounts to be included in reports and spending yet nothing is included other than Payments/Deposits. Seems silly to have to manually go through each entry to change a dividend income to a payment/deposits with dividend income category as a work around to be able to see what we are earning on our money.

I can see this as something someone would want for 401k/retirement plans as they don't plan on taking out the funds but a general investment account is no different than a bank account. Also, what is the point of being able to manually adjust investment accounts to be included in spending and other reports, only to have 99% of the transactions automatically be excluded as some default? Why wouldn't that be our option?

Kyokusui

As a retiree I also agree that dividend/interest income in taxable brokerage accounts should be allowed to be included as income in the Spending Plan. This is a significant portion of my monthly income and whatever you can do to make this easier would be appreciated. I would just like to be able to configure this one account as participating in the spending plan for these types of investment transactions.

UrsulaA

I understand how this option is important for retired people or others who live on their dividends and interest.

I know that some brokers will allow set up of a quarterly or monthly transfer of interest and dividend income from a brokerage account to a checking account. Then, the transfer can be set up as a recurring series and included in the spending plan. This can work in the meantime until the option to include dividend and interest income in the spending plan is implemented.

I would like for dividend and interest income to be optional to include in the spending plan. As someone who is still working and saving, I do not want to see my dividends and interest as available to spend.

pantologist

A workaround is to search all transactions in an investment acct with "income" in it, then "select all" transactions box in upper left, then change category to just "Income" and uncheck the exclude from spending & reports boxes shouldn't be grayed out

UrsulaA

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/26903#Comment_26903

Bulk changing the type/action in an investment account is not possible. I went transaction by transaction to change them from an income type to a payment/deposit type. Then, I was able to categorize the transactions to Interest Earned or Dividend Income as needed.

lklopp

Can you set a rule around specific 403b/401k deposits to automatically be set for "not exclude from spending plan?" This would make it a bit easier rather than having to manually uncheck the box so that these show up as income in the spending plan.

UrsulaA

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/27182#Comment_27182

No, the enhanced rules for that are a feature request.

However, you can I un exclude the entire account yourself from reports under settings/accounts. Simplifi excludes investment accounts by default from the spending plan and reports.

Bgz

I think if you selected the retirement/ brokerage account as a banking account any dividend earned will be considered as income and won’t be automatically excluded from spending plan and reports.

N4KHQ

Does not the investments not go through a bank to receive the income?

UrsulaA

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/27189#Comment_27189

True. A solution that will keep the account as an investment type us to designate transactions as Payment/Deposit type and then recategorize.

This request asks for any investment transaction to have the option for report inclusion, not just Payment/Deposit type.

minx

Some of these potential workarounds are missing the point of investment/brokerage account. Changing the investment account to bank account means that you will no longer have access to transaction types like stock dividends, share tracking in buys/sells, reinvestments, etc. Having to transfer money to bank account in order for it to recognize something as income is also missing the point of leaving your cash in a brokerage account for margin and/or additional investments. That's like saying I have to transfer money from savings to checking before Simplifi will recognize that I have money to spend. My money market account in my investment account is earning higher interest than a savings account at a bank. Money in savings account is still money that I have available to spend. Why forgo the potential for higher interest rate in a savings account to move it to checking to then say it is available to be spent?

This really is a simple solution that I don't understand why Simplifi can't just turn the option on. As a coder, I understand that this is already in the code because there is a feature to include an investment account in spending plan or in reports. So those who don't want them to show (either because they are retirement plans or those who only want salary to be considered income), then click on the options to exclude the ENTIRE account. Nobody is suggesting to change that feature for people who aren't either retirees or very active in the stock market.

However, there is the option to include investment accounts in spending and reports. THE ISSUE is that even once you click those to be included, Simplifi has some weird logic ON TOP of that option that automatically excludes ALL income and expenses from spending and reports EXCEPT for 'payment/deposit' transaction type. This means that I have to MANUALLY go to every income/expense type (e.g., dividend, interest, advisor fees) and change them to be considered in spending plan/reports. So the only thing that including in Spending and Reports option does is turn on 'payment/deposit' type rather than turning on ALL transaction types - so saying I'm choosing to include AN ENTIRE ACCOUNT by clicking off the 'exclude' from spending and reports is a misnomer and very limited. The coders should not block the other income/expense transaction types in investment accounts from being included. The option should be at the ENTIRE account level and if there are specific transactions that someone wants to exclude, then it should have the option on an individual level, no different than if I want to exclude buying groceries from Krogers from my spending/reports.

SRC54

@minx You are pretty much correct, and I argued much the same last year. Investment accounts are not bank accounts. Fortunately, the dividends I receive in my Brokerage accounts, which I spend are classified as Payments so all I have to do is categorize them as Dividends, a category I created since Payments won't use the built-in dividend categories in investments. I then move them to my bank account. So they get counted into my Spending Plan. It may be that your Brokerage Account is also a checking account and you just write checks on it. I can do that, but I don't. Obviously, checks and transfers are payments.

As for my IRAs, I just exclude the account from Reports/Spending Plan, and I have to manually edit them as Reinvest Dividend. They don't download correctly either for Fidelity or Schwab. Fortunately, I have just 14 a month to deal with. Of course, it doesn't really matter what I do since Simplifi just uses the bottom line account value it downloads.

We aren't the only retirees that use Simplifi but it appears most users are younger folks who absolutely DEMANDED that these dividends be excluded by default because they didn't want to have to go back and change each one individually. Unfortunately, that means you and I have to change them all individually. Your solution of letting users decide for themselves whether to include them / exclude them at the account level makes sense. Maybe down the road they will do that.

bigdeepbreath

It would be great if interest income from brokerage accounts could be included with Reports. Right now the option is grayed out. I'm curious why this is the case.

If interest income from brokerage accounts is excluded, then it seems that Monthly Income is not total income because interest income is excluded.

See attached, ideally I could uncheck the Exclude from Reports

Google Chrome - Simplifi - Investments 2024-03-09 at 1.13.20 PM.png

RockLee

If you set "Action" for the investment transaction to "Payment/Deposit", then you can set the visibility for reports. There's not much documentation on Investment transactions, I think this is still a Beta feature under dev.

bigdeepbreath

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/31334#Comment_31334

Thank you. That worked well.

pkBubba

I simply need a fix that allows the investment "income dividend" type to be shown in income reports by allowing the reports and spending exception flags to be changed. Both flagged as an exception by default is good. I would also want the income dividend to allow for a category to be set as I want to see my income by category, taxed, non-taxed, taxed on withdrawal. The workaround to change the investment account added transactions to Payment/Deposit type is not desirable as when the next update occurs I get duplicate "Income Dividend" transactions. This is a pain with over a hundred income dividend transactions per month. I have multiple IRA, Roth IRA and regular investment accounts. I only want the regular investment account dividends to show for spending and I want all income dividends to show on the income reports by selected category. This change is very necessary for income investors. Please help. I'm a new Simplifi Money user and overall I like the program, but this is a major problem for investors.

RockLee

@pkBubba Yea, I receive all my income from investments also, and a large part of that is dividends.

I don't follow the issue with Payment/Deposit that you are describing, you should not be getting duplicates no matter what you do. But, I'm probably just misunderstanding.

Unfortunately there is no multi-edit to change "Action" or to change the visibility of transactions in investments. There is also no ability to create Rules :(. I eagerly await for these features to be added.

minx

I also get duplicates when I change it to payment/deposit. It’s like the system has the field flagged as dividend income so if it doesn’t say that, it thinks it’s a new transaction.

pkBubba

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/31502#Comment_31502

@minx Thanks for confirming that I'm not the only one getting "income dividend" duplicates after changing the first transaction to payment/deposit.

UrsulaA

This happens to me too. I delete the duplicates when they come in.

minx

Issue is that they come back when deleted until they cycle out of what is coming from your financial institution. So I have to wait about 2-3 months before I delete them; otherwise, they keep coming back until the data isn't syncing from the financial institution anymore. Needless to say, it would be a lot easier if the exclude from spending and/or reports actually was an option so that some of us can include them when we want. These workarounds are wonky.

Helen M

I am retired and depend on a substantial portion of my income from my investments. It makes no sense to me that I can't have the option to include or exclude this income stream in my database for my spending plan. It is a no brainer to me. Any movement from Quicken on this issue? I see the investment transaction details are still flagged as BETA data in the system. Does this mean it is something they are working on? I sure hope so!

Coach Jon

Hello @jiehan,

Thanks for posting to the community! We went ahead and merged your post with the existing request here.

The way you can accomplish this now is to use the 'Payment/Deposit' transaction type. The types that can be included are listed in the things to note here: https://help.simplifimoney.com/en/articles/6540220-managing-investment-transactions#h_c7e964d37e

"At this time, there are only certain Investment Transactions that can be included in Reports, the Spending Plan, and Watchlists, such as 'Payment/Deposit'. You'll be able to determine this ability at the transaction level by viewing the 'Exclusions' settings. These Investment Transaction Types, as well as the Investment Account itself, will be excluded by default. However, you can change the visibility settings for both the Investment Account and the Investment Transactions. All other Investment Transaction Types, such as 'Buys' and 'Sells', will always be excluded. Click here for more details!"

Thanks,

Coach Jon

neon45

It sure sounds so easy Coach…. to change Income Dividend to Payment, and it is… unless you have are watching over 8 accounts and have 80 transaction in June alone… And that is only in 3 of the accounts. And, again, we have to change every entry in the Payee column and each Category field as well.

Your suggestion isn't really acceptable for multiple accounts.

pkBubba

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/37581#Comment_37581

Exactly. Coach, please see my March 12th post. I spend hours every month changing "income dividend" transaction actions to "Payment/Deposit" and assigning income dividend categories, but I'm glad at least the laborious work around gives what I need for income reporting. If Simplifi would allow a multi-edit of the action type that would save some time, but making the "income dividend" actions have what "Payment/Deposit" allows would be the correct path. Otherwise "income dividend" actions are only informational. Please help.

I have noticed that my E*Trade account import has some dividends coming in as "Payment/Deposit" action lately. Most of my accounts are with Schwab and still have "Income Dividend" action on import.

neon45

pkBubba.. I talked to the Schwab people who interface with Quicken. This "income divided" thing is all a function of how Simplifi has decided to parse out the data from Schwab. The Schwab guy said all Simplifi had to do was call them and they could work this fiasco out.

pkBubba

Any update on allowing the "Income Dividend" transaction action to have the features of "Payment/Deposit"? If the "Income Dividend" is going to continue to be a information only transaction please contact Schwab so that dividends will come in as "Payment/Deposit" types on import. This way I can categorize the dividends without having to switch all individual "Income Dividends" to "Payment/Deposit" manually. I would appreciate any help I can get. I'm individually switching over a hundred transactions per month, see my March 12th post for more details.

hster

Is there an official feature request for handling "Income Dividend" to upvote on this issue? I would love a workaround that doesn't involve manually changing to Payments which subsequently creates duplicates.