How do you assign a refund or reimbursement transaction to a spending category?

JFKnight

How do I assign a refund or reimbursement transaction to a spending category so that it reduces the spending in that category?

Eg1 A shopping charge transaction gets automatically assigned to a spending category. I later get a refund for that charge. How do I assign that refund to the spending category to reduce the spending in that category by whatever the refund is?

Eg2 A bill is paid and automatically assigned to a recurring bill category. I receive a partial reimbursement for that bill by check. Deposit the check into my account. How do I assign the reimbursement check deposit to the recurring bill category to reduce the spending in that category by whatever the reimbursement check is?

I’ve had 2 coaches tell me it can’t be done and that I have to create a custom income category to show those deposits in my account as income and that by creating these custom income categories, the deposits will only be added to your overall income and will not reduce the spending in the specific spending categories, resulting in false total spending in that category.

thaJack

I do this all the time. Just assign it to the same category that the expense was in. It'll be an amount in the opposite direction, so should be reflected in the spend for that category.

Transaction1: Purchase in Shopping category for $-10.00.
Transaction2: Partial refund in Shopping category for $+5.00.

Assuming only these two transactions, your Shopping category should total $5.00 spent.

I've seen this work in the Spending Plan, as I had one month where at one point incoming money in expense categories outpaced spendind in expense categories and thus other spending was actually a positive number, instead of a negative number.

DannyB

Hmmm, interesting question. I've never paid attention to how a refund assigned to the same category as the initial expense affected my Spending Plan for any given month.

Did the coaches point out the refund feature that is part of every transaction? This allows you to set up reminders for refunds and helps with processing them integrated with Simplifi.

I've used this feature a number of times, but I've never paid any attention as to what happens from there. Now you have me wondering if when that refund is received and associated with the refund reminder does Simplifi add that money back into the spending category it came out of. I've never thought to check but will do some experimenting to find out.

In any case, what I do, is assign the refund or reimbursement to the same category as the original expense. Here again, I've never paid any attention to how this affected my overall total spending for any particular category and here again I have assumed that that would reduce the total amount spent in that category.

JFKnight

theJack,

I was able to solve this issue with regard to crediting categories in Planned Spending however, when I try to assign a check reimbursement deposit to a recurring bill to reduce the spending in that bill category, it won’t reduce the recurring bill amount and puts that now assigned check deposit into other spending as an expense.

DannyB

@JFKnight

If the refund check is recognized as a deposit in the receiving bank account and shows up in Other Spending, I would expect it to show up in Other Spending as a positive.