Feedback: The Spending Plan should offer tracking from Tags in Addition to Categories

jordys1212

I struggle with figuring out how to organize my monthly expenses with this Quicken app, specifically for the budgets my wife and I have monthly, and how it creates a conflict with my tracking my monthly expenses. For instance, we have a joint budget that we use for our date nights, whether it's movies, eating out, game nights, etc. But this conflicts if I go out with a friend or if I treat myself to something individually, which would fall under my own budget. It would still fall under the category of Movies or Eating, etc., but if I create the expense, then it reads that I spend on all of those activities, which is creating issues for me.

I think this should be fixed; or if there's an alternative that I don't know about, I would appreciate the feedback! I am still new and trying to learn how to best manage the app to my knowledge.

UrsulaA

I use watchlists to track spending by tag. You can have a target set up for each tag as well. This works well for me for tracking vacation expenses that fall under different categories.

jordys1212

I get that, I'm learning how to use it. My concern is that my budget expenses are listed only on other spending when it comes to the Spending Plan, which doesn't help me. I'd like to have it on the Spending Plan so I can see the list of my expenses, so I can know when it's going down, and compare how much I have available for the month, etc. I can't do that on the watchlist. On the watchlist, the expenses don't really help me analyze how much I have left over.

EL1234

You could try creating a separate expense category called Joint (or something like that) with subcategories for Movies-Joint, Eating-Joint etc. Then you could use those categories for the joint expenses and have a separate Spending Plan expense for that parent categories and subcategories.

The problem I see with allowing us to use Tags for spending categories is that there can be overlap - a transaction could have two tags, or it could have a tag and a category and then how does Simplifi know which Spending Plan expense it should fall under?

Coach Natalie

@jordys1212, I'd suggest adding your vote and feedback to this existing request, and then following it for updates:

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/1688/add-option-to-create-planned-spending-expenses-based-on-tags-2-merged-votes

Thanks!

-Coach Natalie