Categorizing Investment Transactions

joerg5510

I am new to Simplifi coming from Mint. What is the recommended way to categorize investment transactions - buy, sell, reinvest? These are not expenses or income but labelling them as uncategorized seems to be wrong.

Thanks, Joerg

DannyB

To categorize your investment transaction you need to start with selecting an Action. There is a large list to choose from in the drop-down list when you click in the Action field. Once the appropriate Action is selected, the remaining fields will adjust to accept data appropriate for that action.

For example, Buys will need a ticker symbol our name, number of shares and price per share. Sells are similar. Interest and dividend income typically only need the ticker/name of investment… and so forth with each action.

One thing to keep in mind is that only certain actions can or will affect your Spending Plan. This support article will give you more information about investment transactions in Simplifi:

https://help.simplifimoney.com/en/articles/6540220-managing-investment-transactions

DannyB

@joerg5510

Welcome to Simplifi.

You are going to find that Simplifi will be a different expereince from MInt and I hope you find Simplfi will be a great move for you.

Like everything else, there will be a learning curve as well as some adjustments to what Simplfi is all about and how it differes from other personal finace apps.

Fisrt, here is a link to the support article to help you understand and get started with investment accounts in Simplifi and there are links within that article that will take you to other support articles about Investment accounts and transactions.

As far as categorization goes you will need to start with the "Action" field for each transaction. By selecting the correct type of Action you will be able to correctly edit the remaining fields which will become active or not depending on the type of transaction.

Again, welcome to Simplifi and welcome to the Simplifi online community forum!

BillM

I have various accounts at Fidelity and when transactions are downloaded into Simplifi, the action is always Payment/Deposit, Security/Payee is description of the transaction, and Description / Category is always Uncategorized.

However, all of this information is present in the transaction detail. # of shares and price is available (as it correctly identifies these details in Quicken Premier) but not present in Simplifi. Copying data from Quicken Premier to Simplifi would be time consuming and not sure there is value in doing this.

Why does Simplifi not correctly populate these fields with the information downloaded as it does in Quicken Premier?

I am assessing Simplify currently and find overall easy to use but falls short in several areas such as:

• limited sub-category creation.
• inability to setup recurring transaction with splits
• automatically populating investment transaction detail
• no built-in calculator (helpful when splitting transactions)
• auto calculation of split transactions only go 3 deep
• linking of recurring transactions seldom work

Hopefully many of these issues will be resolved/improved over time.

The ability to use on our iPad (via Microsoft Edge) is useful and has been dependable thus far is certainly a plus as Quicken Premier does not provide this ability (mobile app has corrupted data many times so do not use)

Will use until subscription renewal and decided whether to keep or not.

Coach Natalie

@BillM, I'd suggest adding your feedback regarding Investment Transactions here:

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/3788/introducing-investment-transactions-share-your-feedback-here

-Coach Natalie

Jenae

I do not understand the above response stating to "begin selecting an action". There is no visible button labeled "action" on the transaction itself. In Mint, our investments transactions were automatically categorized with buy or sell and were not put in an "uncategorized" category and counted against spending. I need to remove all these investment transactions from spending and label them as buy, sell or some sort of transfer. Again, I can't find any "Action" button.

UrsulaA

You can hide the entire investment account transactions from the account settings. Action is not a button, it is a column on the investment transaction list.

UrsulaA

Also, Mint's autocategorization of the investment transactions was hit or miss. I got buys categorized as withdrawals and sells as income before. I had to go recategorize these transactions often.

I like Simplifi's feature of hiding the account from the spending plan.