How do you cope with multiple recurring transactions from the same biller?
I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon, and the 26th of each month is my Subscribe and Save day. I get everything for my cats (litter, wet and dry food, treats) laundry detergent, tea, a bunch of other stuff. Each item is billed separately, and I have set up each item in the Spending Plan for the 26th. But it also means I get a ton of transactions, all from Amazon, on the 26th. I've encountered some issues that I wonder if others have encountered, and how you deal with them.
1.) Non-recurring transactions from Amazon, if they occur within a week to 10 days of the 26th, will frequently get incorrectly matched to one of the Sub&Save items. For instance, I might buy a gift on the 20th, and it will get incorrectly matched to Cat Treats with the helpful message that "this is $2.47 less than expected" or some such, and Cat Treats is marked as Paid in the Spending Plan.
2.) I go into the transaction to edit it back to correct information with the proper categories and such, but now the Spending Plan doesn't think I'm going to spend anything on Cat Treats at all this month. It's as if I deleted the current month's item, instead of just editing it into correctness. The only solution I've found for this is to go into next month's Spending Plan, edit the series for the item, and choose this month's date at the next date.
3.) Then there are times when a transaction is incorrectly not matched to a Spending Plan item. I bought cat food and the bill was $.03 different than the Spending Plan. Somehow, I now have two Cat Food items in the Spending Plan, one paid and the other not.
I have no idea how this happened. I suspect it happened as a result of the manual fiddling I had to do to straighten out the spending plan. Because I had to edit a LOT of things. But the fact that this happened at all suggests that having to go through this regular process of fixing the Spending Plan is not just tedious, it is prone to errors.
4.) Often, when matching happens incorrectly, things that should be in the Spending Plan end up in Other Spending. I've had groceries show up there, and lots of other stuff. Another place that I have to go in a manually fix a bunch of stuff. Whis is error-prone.
5.) Speaking of fixing categories so that a transaction is properly categorized after a mismatch, when you go into a transaction register and choose "Link to Existing Recurring" for a transaction, I get a dozen different things that all say Amazon. There is also listed the amount and frequency of the recurring Spending Plan items, but it's still very difficult to know which Amazon recurring item this particular transaction should be attached to. It would be very helpful to me if this particular dialog box included the category as well, as that would help me nail down which recurriing item I'm looking for.
Have others had these sorts of experiences? Has anyone found good, reliable workflows to deal with them? I'd love to hear!
Anthony Bopp
Simplifi User Since July 2022Money talks. But all my paycheck ever says is goodbye
Best Answer
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@ajbopp, thanks for posting!
Hopefully other users come along with a similar experience and have great advice for you. I don't have anything set up like this in Quicken Simplifi, but a couple of things stand out to me in your post that I wanted to mention:
- When a Reminder is improperly linked to a transaction, you can unlink it instead of editing it and then going back to the Recurring Series to correct the next Reminder instance date. Unlinking the transaction from the Reminder should bring the Reminder back, as well as revert the Payee and Category of the transaction to the original downloaded data.
- Since Quicken Simplifi is designed to learn over time, hopefully some manual intervention of unlinking from the incorrect transaction and then linking to the correct transaction will help improve things down the road for you. Though, I do see how Quicken Simplifi could become confused with which one to link to when several transactions download in a single day.
- When it comes to your last point (number 5), have you considered maybe renaming some of the items so they have a distinct name? Though not quite the same scenario, I have different Recurring Series' for "Amazon Prime", "Amazon Music" etc, and I know which one is which based on the name. Maybe you could do "Amazon Cats", "Amazon Groceries", "Amazon Households", etc. Just a thought!
- Seeing the Category when using the "Link to existing transaction" option would make for a great Idea post.
I hope this is at least somewhat insightful!
-Coach Natalie
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Answers
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Thanks @Coach Natalie! I had no idea about the unlinking feature. It will save a lot of work for me in the future!
Anthony Bopp
Simplifi User Since July 2022Money talks. But all my paycheck ever says is goodbye1
