Education category in Planned Spending is not capturing any transactions
In my Planned Spending, there is a category for Education. Education has some other sub-categories underneath by default, and then I have added one more sub-category. I usually have three expense transactions in my custom sub-category and one expense transaction straight under main "Education" category every month. But none of these transactions are captured in Education category under Planned Spending, and these transactions are not even showing up in Other Spending to be resolved, so they are being captured into some ghost category in Planned Spending. I have made sure they are not part of any other categories in the Planned Spending either. The total of these four transactions is good $1000+ so it will be noticed if they are being captured into some other categories.
I have deleted the category from Planned Spending, and have recreated in the hope that it would capture the transactions but there is no change in the behavior.
Anyone has any idea?
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Hello @shameed,
To assist with this issue, I attempted to replicate what you describe, but wasn't able to do so. Are you seeing this in the Web app, the Mobile app, or both? When did you first notice this issue? Are you using the Education category with your own custom subcategory, or did you create a custom Education category also (It won't let you create a duplicate category, but it will let you create categories with similar names)? Would you please post a screenshot of what you are seeing (with any personal information redacted)?
I look forward to your reply!
-Coach Kristina
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Hi Kristina, Thanks for you reply.
I believe it is the original Education category that was already there when I started with Quicken last December. I just added one sub-category in it named Quran. As you can see in the Transactions snapshot, this month, I had 4 transactions: one in Education category and three in Quran category. And you can see the Planned Spending has an Education card, with zero spend. So basically Planned Spending is not able to detect that there was any Education expense. So far Education is the only category that has this issue. All the other ones are detectnig their respective expenses correctly.
Today, however I have created many more categories in the Planned Spending because I signed up for Early Access to access the rollover feature, which I am so glad that Simplifi now offers because that was something I really missed coming from Mint. I will see how these new categories behave, but for now the issue is limited to Education category.
I have been seeing this issue ever since I started in last Dec.
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Hi Kristina, thanks for your reply. I replied back but I don't know what happened to that message, it is not showing up anymore. Oh well, here it is again.
I have attached two snapshots. As you can see in the Transactions snapshot, there are four transactions that fall under Education category in this month. One directly into Education category and the other three are in my custom sub-category under Education. This is the only custom sub-category I created under Education. As far as I remember, Education category was already there, I did not create it. All the other sub-categories under Education are also default. There are no transactions for those sub-categories though.
As you can see in the Planned Spending snapshot for Education category, it shows there is zero spend on Education category, which is clearly not true. As far as I can tell there is no such issue with any of the other categories in Planned Spending. One peculiar thing about it is that two of the transactions are Cash and manually entered. The other two are credit card and Zelle transactions though. I don't know how much that matters. Just point it out.
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Here is the third snapshot showing the Education category and sub-categories.
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Ok, I think I figured out what's going on. Since the transactions are marked as recurring, they are counted towards Bills, but they are not counted towards Planned Spending. The moment I unlink the transactions, they start showing up in Planned Spending.
Is that by design? Why would some transaction not be "planned" if it is part of bills? Are bills not planned? This does not make sense if it is by design. Or it is a bug that needs to be fixed as soon as possible.
If it is a "feature" I will have to remove all my "bills" and have them counted towards Planned Spending. Planned Spending gives me a good view of my monthly spending given that now rollover works.
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"Ok, I think I figured out what's going on. Since the transactions are marked as recurring, they are counted towards Bills, but they are not counted towards Planned Spending. The moment I unlink the transactions, they start showing up in Planned Spending."
Yes, that is correct and by design. The spending plan counts recurring transactions linked to a series in Income after bills and subscriptions and not planned spending.
Note: The Spending Plan is designed to not double-count transactions. For example, if you have a transaction that was linked to a Recurring Reminder, the transaction will be counted towards the Bills and Income section of the Spending Plan instead of a Planned Spending expense of the same Category. Learn more here!
The main drawback about moving bills and subscriptions to planned spending is that the projected cash flow will not be accurate.
Feature requests related to your question:
Simplifi User Since Nov 2023
Minter 2014-2023
Questionable Excel before 2014 to present
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Thanks for the info. This is really disappointing. I am really surprised that this is the case. I have placed some comments in the post and upvoted. But it was already in negative so I don't think it is happening any time soon. I am sure all mint users would be unpleasantly surprised to discover this feature that transactions can go either in Bills or in Planned Spending, but not into both. How could bills be not considered Planned Spending? I don't get it.
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