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Update next reminder amount for credit cards automatically using the account balance (edited)

y11

Please consider for users to be aware of credit card payment due, adding feature to set recurring series with balance as of specified X date after specified Y days.

For example, I want this series to evaluate on 12/05 the balance then create payment reminder on 12/30 with the balance.

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Coach Natalie

@y11, thanks for posting your suggestion to the Community!

I'm not sure that I understand your request; can you provide some additional details, please? For example, what would Quicken Simplifi evaluate to get the balance? If the credit card is unable to be connected via Bill Connect, how would Quicken Simplifi obtain this data (I'm assuming this is what you mean by "without biller dependency")? If this is something you'd set up yourself, would it be an option under the Recurring Series, or how exactly would that look?

The more details you can provide when requesting a new feature or enhancement, the better! Since you want your idea to gain traction, you'll want to give a clear picture for both users and our product team.

-Coach Natalie

y11

Absolutely, let's say I have chase credit account.

First of all, I want to track my credit card bill to be tracked by simplifi so that cash flow can predict amount of cash I have so I can plan making payments. However chase is not registered biller in simplifi so it can't be done. Workaround is to create series manually which I can track due date for each credit card but need to evaluate the amount so the cash flow can predict how much is needed, which will be different each month. (Maybe it already does that? Still new here but it didn't appear so)

So given that I have chase credit card that has statement date on 5th, I would like to setup series that Simplifi app will capture balance as of date, 5th, and setup bill reminder each month that is due user specified (for example, 20) days later.

Otherwise it would be very hard for credit card users to use cash flow functionality.

For actual change, I expect to see next to amount field with option to choose checkbox that says "use balance as of date" and disables the amount input field.

y11

fwiw this is a major use case of mint users and many are seeking this specific functionality. (and many of competitors are looking into this, per below link thread) This seems great opportunity for simplifi to capture the users

https://www.reddit.com/r/mintuit/comments/17p4t6c/what_app_shows_credit_card_bills_due/

Coach Natalie

@y11, thanks! So basically, Quicken Simplifi would look at the balance of the account as of a certain date each month and adjust your next upcoming Reminder accordingly, correct?

I'd say that some of what you're looking for is already available. Since most credit cards send out statements and have due dates on or around the same date each month, you can easily tell Quicken Simplifi what date the payment will be due when setting up the Recurring Series. Quicken Simplifi also wouldn't need to create a Reminder for you, as these will already exist once the Series is set up; it would just be a matter of the amount for that Reminder adjusting automatically based on the account balance.

I think most users, myself included, currently manually update the amount of their upcoming credit card Reminders with the balance due as soon as they see their statement. I think your idea could implement an automatic process for this. Does that sound about right based on the current design and the enhancements you'd like to see? 😀

-Coach Natalie

RobWilk

I'm going to vote for this, but I can imagine it can get kind of complicated deciding how and when to set up this functionality - where and how would you prompt for it and explain it (you might not want this on all accounts. You need to prompt for the approximate day of the month the statement ends and then decide what day of the month you want to schedule that payment for each month. Even then, the actual dates can change month to month — things like weekends can affect them; also, with some banks, it's every 30 days other banks are a day of the month).

y11

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/21102#Comment_21102

Sounds about right and I can see the manual work would do. It's just that I have 5 to 10 credit cards I actively use each month (using different cards to get promotion cash back) so updating after each statements manually does become a bit cumbersome. I may be the edge case :)

y11

On second thought... I have total of 20 to 30 credit cards I use including ones I occasionally use (keeping them for benefits) so this would add noise that I need to be aware of and take away attention. Ideally this "smart" series should know NOT to create reminder instance for given month if balance is zero (or positive).

DannyBoy

Greetings! Here for this as well, in the midst of migrating from Mint.

While using Mint for some budgeting and getting a bird's eye view (however, at times, not exact) into ongoing finances, the functionality that I rely on the most is the aggregation of all credit card (and other loan) accounts with updated balances and due dates / payment reminders.

After researching for quite a bit for a replacement I was lured by Simplifi's promise of seeing all your bills in one place (aside from all other excellent functionality that, personally for me, is a nice-to-have but not the main event), except "bills" here is service providers like utilities and subscriptions, all of which I already have on auto-pay on my credit cards and bank accounts—I suspect, and expect, most users to have the same setup so I question the value here, but regardless, a CC account appears as an account and not a bill to pay. I more than echo @y11's note that this is a very sought-after use case, and frankly am dumbfounded that not one of the many personal finance apps offer this functionality, save for the soon-to-be-defunct Mint.

Now, as for the pseudo solution offered on this thread, if clarifications can be provided—as I understand it, the details and process are as follows:
1. Credit card accounts in Simplifi are just that, accounts, and do not appear natively as billers
2. To add them as billers, firstly only for the purpose of seeing due date/reminder for payment, user needs to find, or create, a recurring charge (Settings —> All recurring), which de-facto is the payment from the bank to the credit card, so that Simplifi will show when such payment would be due next. [This can be any date, say due date less 5 to be on the safe side, and is really akin to setting up reminders on one's calendar]
3. Once a manual bill/payment is added (meaningfully only showing a selected due date), to be able to also see the due amount on the latest statement (or is it the current balance? Two different things!), the recurring charge must be connected to a biller, assuming it exists. If it doesn't (e.g. Chase, Citi, BofA, CapitalOne, many auto financial companies) then the only info is the manually input due date, and a (manually entered) payment amount info only if it is identical each month

If this is all correct, then not only is the setup manual and cumbersome (for those of us who have more than a few cars and billers), many billers do not exist and even with those that do exist, the setup doesn't seem to work at all! I'm now on my third charge for which the "connect biller" is either hanging or hitting a snag (wrong password with correct password).

Help! Is there any hope on the horizon?

DannyB

Sometimes it feels like this whole thing is being way over thought and being made way more complicated than it really is or needs to be.

If one is managing their finances appropriately (i.e. expenses are less than income for whatever period of time one chooses to set (In Q-Simplifi the time horizon is monthly). I have a highly predictable amount of monthly income. This has been the case all my working life going back to 1968 and even before if I count my paper route. By the same token I have had fairly stable monthly expenses. Both income and expenses have certainly changed through the years and for most years income exceeded expenses.

Q-Simplifi is set up to give you a way to capture all your routine, recurring income and expenses on a month-to-month basis. These are broken down into fixed expensed and flexible expenses. Monthly bills and subscriptions (however you want to distinguish the two) along with the ability to set up contributions to any type of savings you want to do monthly. You can now even include transfers and credit card payments if these actually impact your monthly inflow or outflow. Flexible, but predictable monthly expenses such as transportation costs, groceries, find a home in the Planned Spending section where you can set the limits you want or need.

When it's all added up and adjusted you are given a bottom line for the upcoming month and the opportunity to make adjustment as needed to make you monthly financial life balance out.

If you are using CCs to pay for some or all of your spending plan, the credit card account that is expressly used to pay for routine monthly expenses and is fully paid off each month is not a separate expense - it is simply an extension of your cash accounts. @y11 , for example, uses credit cards - and lots of them it appears - for the rewards and benefits the credit card companies offer to incentivize us to use them. These incentives are meaningless if you don't pay off the balance monthly thus avoiding the exorbitant interest charges. They give us a little bit of what the merchant pays them to make a credit card service available to the consumer, but hey, whatever it takes, right? Now I'm overthinking this!

OK, I also pay a number of bills through my credit cards for much the same reason as @y11 . But using the CC means I didn't take that cash out of my cash account and send it to my biller. Nevertheless, Simplif notes that a bill was paid and doesn't care how I paid it. The cash I need to cover that expense sits in my cash account until I decided to bring my CC account current. Then I send the cash I would have sent to the merchant to the CC company instead because they have already sent money on my behalf to the original biller. Thus a payment to my CC is not and expense. It's just a shuffling of money from a Pay-before-you-play account (cahs account like checking) to a play-now-pay-latter account (i.e. credit card).

Therefore, I pretty much know what my cc balance is going to be every month since that balance reflects my normal everyday spending that I track in my Spending Plan and, as stated earlier, is and has been very stable for many years (taking into account of course increases in income, expenses due to inflation and rising level of lifestyle related to the income increases and other factors that for the most part are predictable enough to be able to use something like Q-Simplifi's Spending Plan.

The feature @y11 is requesting may be useful but not sure how necessary it would be for someone who uses CCs responsibly.

MtnCreed

Not all credit card providers, such as Chase Bank, support bill connections to automatically set the bill reminder based on the amount due. This makes it challenging to see your checking projected balance, when major credit card bill payments are missing.

To solve the issue of not being able to connect providers via bill pay, it would be great to have a type of calculated bill reminder that would have the set amount based on what the credit card balance was on a certain day of the month.

DannyBoy

Even accounts that are supposedly supported—available through the "Connect Biller"—do not manage to actually connect; I already tried three different accounts, all hanging on "Trying…" and then ending with the red "We're working on…"

I really wanted to like Simplifi but this is frustrating and dissapointing.

Josh_Currier

So to add something to this and hopefully bring some clarification, from what I am understanding is the following.

People would like to see their credit card payment reminder amount linked based on the balance that is being show on their cc account at any given time. This allows for accurate cash flow planning as not everyone has a ton of money sitting in their checking account.

Example: I pay my credit card off every week, so if I have a reminder setup to pay the credit card. That reminder amount would be at zero until the credit card starts showing transactions then the payment amount would update based on the current credit card balance.

AS A SIDE NOTE: THERE IS A PRODUCT THAT ALREADY DOES THIS AND DOES IT VERY VERY WELL THAT YOU CAN STEAL THE CODE FROM 😀 QUICKEN FOR DESKTOP HAS HAD THIS FOR YEARS. It was one of the biggest features i missed when switching from quicken desktop to quicken simplifi. Look at the "estimated amount" section on that software. there is an option for estimate amount based on current balance.

DannyBoy

Not quite, @Josh_Currier

Your scenario notwithstanding (kudos for paying every week!), I personally am looking for the simple aggregation of CC bills into the platform, just like any other bill, and like I had on Mint. In detail: whenever a CC account sends the monthly statement that bill is captured with (1) due date, (2) due amount per the statement, (3) minimum amount per the statement, in addition to (already existing on the platform) the running current balance.

This way I know by which date I have to pay the latest statement, and choose how much to pay as long as it's at least the minimum. It's beyond me how this has been a simple and powerful functionality of Mint since its inception and doesn't exist here; this "Quicken Desktop" you're mentioning, is that Quicken Classic? I would gladly upgrade if that is in fact the case.

Josh_Currier

@DannyBoy

Yeah "quicken classic" is another tool owned by them. In some cases, i wouldn't say it's an upgrade. It is a more robust tool in some ways because it has been around for decades. (it's what i used before simplifi). downside is it really is desktop based with not the best web app. You have to install it locally. It does a lot of things better than simplifi and gives more options but simplifi IF its framework works for you has some advantages in how it displays the data as well as it is web based and seems to get features added to it so its SLOWLY catching up. But it wouldnt hurt if you want to try it. There are tons of youtube videos on "quicken" that might give you the answer beforehand.

Josh_Currier

@DannyBoy

Also to answer your questions now that i understand it better i don't think even quicken classic handles credit cards the way you are wanting, i would still double check but i dont recall a way to have it setup that way. Sorry for not understanding the first time.

y11

interesting to come back after couple weeks and see some traffic on this.

just want to add 2 cents - I want to maximize every cent I have in my cash account - so on my pay day:

receive paycheck
pay any pending bills, including credit card bills full between now and next paycheck
send remaining cash to high-yield saving account
remaining cash in check account: less than $100.

Please help me save money by getting those interests :)

ZezeC

Simplifi developers, please, please, copy the bills to pay feature of Mint. It shows the balance due on all your credit cards, due date, and greatly simplifi-es (pun intended) paying the monthly balance in full on multiple credit cards. I use the feature to estimate how much money I should leave on my bank account. Many users do the same. Doing that in Simplifi is a chore, if not altogether impossible unless you set it up as a recurring payment.

n8likes2Save

I'm echoing the comments here. One of the single biggest value adds of Mint was the "Bills and Subscriptions" section that showed all upcoming credit card payments (without messing around/configuring Billers).

The Bills section seemed to work with all credit card companies.

This feature alone is worth every penny of an annual Simplifi subscription.

UrsulaA

I agree with @n8likes2Save - I was testing the Bill Connect service to connect my billers and while I was aware that Capital One and other banks do not play with bill connect, I could not even connect xfinity or Mint Mobile.

Update: Just connected GEICO.

Being able to connect the credit card bills with the recurring reminders will be a time saver to estimate cash flow from my checking account. The expense equation is already covered with the spending plan. For now, I have a notification set up on each credit card letting me know of the statement balance and autopay set up to pay such balance. When I get the notification, I will update my reminder to pay the credit card bill with the statement balance. Will love if Simplifi saves me this manual step. Agree with this.

I am also using the credit balance to estimate statement balance as @DannyB outlines in his post.

Jonathan S

Very much agree. I'm also migrating from Mint. My primary use for Mint was the "Bills and Subscriptions" feature where I had an aggregated view of all my bills, due dates, amounts due, and (for credit cards) was able to validate all transactions contributing to the statement amount. I could then take that amount and due date to pay the bill through my bank website. No need for paper statements, reminder emails etc. The feature description for Simplifi suggested similar functionality was available - but that's not the case. I like a lot about Simplifi - but this (at least for me) is a huge feature gap re: Chase in particular.

geekmax

+1 for this feature

Helios

Please add Citibank option in biller

UrsulaA

Until Simplifi implements this feature, I will be tracking my credit card statement balances and due dates by updating the reminders in Simplifi manually to keep my projected checking account balance updated. I move money from a high yield savings account to checking to cover expenses. I am earning interest in idle cash.

I am using a competing free app that gives me credit card statement balances and due dates all in one place. That app is helping me gather the info to update my Simplifi reminders. However, I find that my credit card balances in Simplifi are accurate. I just need the amount of what I am paying the credit card to keep my checking account projected balance accurate and to not bounce any payments.

y11

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/23958#Comment_23958

Hello can you share what that free app is?

Charlie H

This feature request is exactly correct. A feature to import the statement balance and due date for credit cards is a HUGE gap and is the #1 thing missing to convert Mint users.

dabing

+1 for this feature

srslay

I use several credit cards for everything. Being able to automatically update the amount I need to pay for my credit cards is very important so I can mazimize the amount of money in my high yield savings account for as long as I can. I automate as much as possible because life is busy.

If necessary due to a lack of Bill Connect capability, add sections for credit card bills to have the card account, statement date, and due date. Then it would just be able to roll the total of all expenses during the statement range.

tkuligowski

Yeah I posted something similar to this. Coming from Mint. Really need a product that can grab CC statement amount data. Mint is able to do this with my Chase account. I don't understand why Simplifi cant.

wgn_luv

One of the main uses I had for Mint was seeing all my CC bills and their due dates in one place and making sure I'll have those amounts available in my checking account on those dates.

I was so excited to see the Cash Flow feature in Simplifi before I signed up coz I assumed it'll take my CC bills into account. You can imagine my disappointment after I signed up and I realized Simplifi doesn't have any clue about my CC bills and due dates. Hey Simplifi team, if you're reading this, please pull the statement balance and due date info from our CC accounts like Mint did and integrate it with the Cash Flow feature. You'll have a lifetime subscriber if you do that!

Also as a tangent, who cares about cash flow in a credit card account? I'm curious what's the use case for that is.

UrsulaA

After using a free aggregator to get my credit card payment amounts to match the statement, I am reminded of what some users have said - Simplifi is a secondary source and the banks are the primary source. The aggregator got some amounts to be paid incorrect for a PNC card calculating instead what the current balance was instead of the statement balance due from the prior month. Even Mint had mistakes like this. I do find that Simplifi's balance is accurate.

I agree with @DannyB - another way of going about credit card payments is to pay the balance displayed on Simplifi as of a given day to keep the credit card current. Use the normal credit card due date in the recurring credit card transfer reminder. The projected cash flow for my checking accounts helps me determine funds available to pay the credit cards.