Subcategories not being included in Planned Spending (edited)

William K

In my spending plan Simplifi does not include sub categories. So for example if my category is Utilities and I have sub categories of: gas, electric, water. If my expenses are in those sub categories they do not show up under Utilities. To fix this I needed to put all these expenses in the top level Utilities category. I think it would be helpful to have a software switch that would allow all sub category spending to be included. This to me would be very helpful in tracking spending to budget.

UrsulaA

The behavior you are experiencing is strange and sounds like a bug. I set up a planned spending category of Auto & Transport (parent category). During the month, I spent funds on gas and parking. Transactions assigned to gas and parking, subcategories of Auto & Transport, show up in my Auto & Transport planned spending tile.

From your request, you are asking for the utilities category to show the same behavior as my screenshot illustrates. Is that right?

Deleting and recreating the troublesome planned spending items or series works to fix your display issue. Can you try doing so?

atommasi

When I select a top level category, it seems that sub-categories are not getting included.

For instance, I have Dining & Drinks set, yet for all of last month, none of the sub categories were included, except for one, school lunch, which is a custom category I created. Resturants, Fast Food, Coffee Shops.. they all show in the other spending. And it's doing it again for this month as well.

Am I doing something wrong?

ajbopp

Hmmm... I'm not getting those results.

Food is a sub-category of Groceries. Of course, I buy groceries on Thursdays, and there were ironically 5 of those in February in this Leap Year, so I went over the plan.

Can you post screen shots of your Edit Planned Spending Expense, and your Settings → Categories item to show how that particular sub-category is attached to the main one?

UrsulaA

@William K and @atommasi

Deleting and recreating the troublesome planned spending items or series worked for me when I had a similar issue with a planned spending top category. Can you try doing so? Let us know how it goes.

DannyB

Hi @William K

Looks like you have two scenarios going on here. To clarify:

In your original post you talk about your Utilities and in your follow-on, you talk about Dining & Drinks.

Typically I would think of Utilities as recurring bills and as such these will be accounted for in the Spending Plan under Income after bills & savings in the Bills section. If this is the case these same expenses will be show up in a Planned Spending category also as this would mean double counting these expenses. If you want to track all spending in your Utility top category with your various utilities as subcategories this can be done by setting up a Watchlist.

As for Dining & Drinks, this category would typically be set up in the Spending Plan under Planned Spending. I just set up a Test category with Test 1, Test 2, Test 3 and Test 4 as subcategories. Then I went to Planned Spending and created the category "Testing cats/subcats and designated the top category "Test" as the expenses I want to track. I went to my checking account register and created an entry for each subcategory in my new Test category. I returned to the Spending Plan and checked in the Planned Spending section and this is my result:

This is what you should be seeing for your Dining & Drinks with all expenses assigned to any subcategory being included.

Is this helpful? How can we help further to make this right for you?

William K

Hi Everyone,

Appreciate all the comments. My experience (and I am fairly new to Simplifi so I did reach out for support and response was that I’d need to track subs independently) is that sub category spending shows up as uncategorized. An example is below where I have bagels as a sub to groceries:

The bagels expense does not show up in my spending plan category of groceries, see below:

I am not sure why this is happening…would prefer all subs to roll into top level category of Groceries in this case.

Regards,

Bill

RobWilk

If there were a way to do it where you couldn't DOUBLE COUNT the main category and the subcategories (so if you had utilities→electric, and paid the electric bill, and it wouldn't ding you both under electric and utilities), then I think it should do that. Really, though, planned spending is really just holding money aside for specific known planned spending, where you would typically know which specific category/subcategory the spending was in. It's not like an old school budget where you set categories as 'goals' which are usually non-specific.

UrsulaA

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/30558#Comment_30558

The support agent quality of responses varies. I track top and sub categories in the spending plan together.

Have you tried deleting the planned expense, utilities, and adding it again at the top level category with all sub categories selected? This action fixed the issue you are experiencing for me a few weeks ago.

atommasi

It definatly seems like a bug. Deleting and recreating the spending plan expense seems to resolve the issue for now.

And to clarify, this doesn't happen for everything, I have other spending plan expenses set up for for top level categories and the problem does not happen with them.

atommasi

@DannyB

Looks like you have two scenarios going on here. To clarify:

It looks like my post was merged with this one because it's the same issue, OP isn't experiencing two scenerios.

ScottG918

same issue here, deleting and recreating didn't fix. Some spending plans tied to parent categories are working for me, showing the sub level categories, but others are not.

Coach Natalie

@ScottG918, thanks for posting on this topic!

I'm not personally seeing an issue with Subcategories being included in my top-level Planned Spending expenses —

To clarify, where are the transactions in question located in your Spending Plan? Have they been linked to a Recurring Reminder or anything along those lines? Also, are you experiencing this issue on the Quicken Simplifi Web App, the Mobile App, or both?

Please let us know so we can best assist!

-Coach Natalie