Suggestion for Spending Plan

CWW

The Spending Plan feature is really great for planning out future cash flow; ie known income, bills/subscriptions/payments, transfers, etc. This feature is almost the heartbeat of Simplifi, or one of them!

One limitation worth looking at with in the Spending Plan is, ‘Planned Spending’, where you can add a one time, or recurring, expenses that are not considered a subscription or bill. The limiting factor of this function is that it is only based on categories, and you are limited to one entry per category.

My suggestion is to enable ‘Planned Spending’ to use vendor names and allow multiple entries per category. This allows for you to plan for known upcoming spends/expenses, by vendor. For example, in March my daughter is getting braces and my son is getting glasses, both a medical expense, and both very expensive. I would like to have each of these items in the ‘Planned Spending’ by unique vendor name, but kept in the same category.

This enables meaningful cash flow planning by allowing the user to plan (and consider) unique and known expenses in coming months.

ajbopp

You might to consider asking a coach to turn this into an idea post so others can vote on it. It would likely get my vote as it seems like a useful capability.

In the meantime, a workaround I would probably use for this particular case (one-off large expenses) is to go to Transactions and create one-time transactions there, future dated for when these will occur. I think that will get you to the place you want to be as far as tracking the expenses and making the cash flow look right.

DannyB

I’m not quite clear on what you are asking for. What I think you’re asking for is a way to plan for these expenses so they appear on your projected cash flow graph of your payment account and you want to set these expenses up in Planned Spending for a future month.

One thing to keep in mind is that right now planned spending is not accounted for in cash flow projections.

Currently to have these expenses to be counted in your cash flow projections you can create a one time recurring expense for each one. You can set the future date for whenever you expect this expense to occurs. You can then categorize them as something like Medical Expense: Daughter for your daughter’s braces, and Medical Expense: Son for your son’s glasses. For Frequency select One-time payment. Select Bill (i know you’re trying to avoid this designation, but it’s not a category) This will include both expenses in your spending plan under bills and will show up in the payment accounts cash flow graph.

Again, I’m not quite clear on what you are suggesting. 🙂

UrsulaA

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/28887#Comment_28887

I understand the request to mean allow a user to add planned spending item by payee in addition to by category. The request is also to lump multiple categories on a planned spending tile. Is that correct @CWW ?

I have set up future recurring expenses in the way described above for projecting cash flow myself. It works well.

UrsulaA

Also, will this newly released feature help?

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/28883#Comment_28883

CTopher

Another idea is to allow dates to be assigned to planned expenses so they appear in Cash Flow.

For example, I know I will grocery shop on payday, and I know I will buy an additional solar panel on the second payday of the month. But neither of those expenses are bills, so I do not like them included in my bill section. However, they are expenses that must appear in my cash flow projection.

From what I gather, the two remain separated (Cash flow and planned expenses) because the introduction of date-less expenses will reduce the fidelity of the cash flow projection to identify where balances are expended to drop below pre-set thresholds or below zero.

Adding expected dates and introducing a radio button or toggle to show the specific planned expense or expense category once a date is assigned in cash flow would be fantastic.

DannyB

Hi @CTopher

Welcome to the conversation! This topic has been and is an ongoing conversation and feature request in the community. You can add your upvote and comments here:

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/1651/ability-to-add-planned-spending-items-to-our-projected-cash-flow-edited-4-merged-votes