How do you deal with a Hourly Job income?

Mkats13

I have just started using Simplifi, but I am running into a slight hiccup. I have an hourly job.

For the most part, I get paid around the same amount every payroll, but it can vary depending on the jobs. I couldn't find a way to setup a reoccurring income that would work well.

I have opted to just forget anticipating upcoming paychecks, but the app likes to say I am in the red.

Has anyone found a good solution to this issue?

DannyB

So, do you receive a paycheck from a specific employer or are you paid by different individuals/entities through the month. Do you receive you pay routinely, i.e. every week, every two weeks, once a month, 1st and 15th? If you have multiple payors the custom income may be your best bet, but you would need to talk to someone at Simplifi support to see how best to set that up. I've tried using it a couple of time for a particular situation, but it didn't work out the way I hopped. If you have a single employer with a recurring paycheck you should be able to use a recurring income set up.

I beleive your monthly reminders will automatically update the amount once a paycheck clears at your bank. You may have to make the match if Simplifi doesn't recognize that a paycheck should attach to a particular reminder.

I have several bills that vary in amount due each month and they automatically adjust when the bills are paid and downloaded into Simplifi. the Sam is same is true for several interest deposits that very from month to month and Simplifi uses the actual amount once the data is downloaded into Simplifi.

You should be able to set up recurring income for your paychecks and set the amount for either an average, or for what your lowest amount may be based on your pay history.

Wedo778

What would your ideal solution do?

By nature of being hourly, I assume you're getting paid weekly or every two weeks. You can set up recurring paychecks for those timeframes. They will of course be estimates of your pay, because as you say your pay fluctuates based on the job. But, to be blunt, so what? Why do you feel its bad for the recurring pay to be an estimate, what are you trying to do with your financial tracking that this doesn't allow you to do? Knowing that will help get a better answer.

You can manually adjust the next one each pay period to factor in what that job is paying. Or you can let it be an estimate that you know can be off sometimes which then gets resolved when the actual paycheck clears. But the system can't automagically know your next job pays more/less. You would have to tell it that.

DannyB

@Mkats13

I agree with @Wedo778

The only way to stay out of the red in any budgeting app is to have income that surpasses or at least equals your outflow. If you don't want to track your actual income as recurring based on at least an estimation of a typical paycheck, you can use the custom income feature.

Open the Spending Plan, click on the 3 dot ellipses at the far right of the Income section, click on "Set custom amount" and input an estimate of what you believe you will make for the month based on your past monthly income amounts. This will at least give your Spending Plan somethin to work with and will allow you to plan your spending accordingly.

Mkats13

@Wedo778 I guess my ideal solution is a reoccurring transaction that has settings to catch a range/payee combo that could be set to an estimate, and once the actual payment clears, it changes accordingly. From my interaction with reoccurring transactions, it seem to set on a specified value and stays at that. I don't know if I am missing something or not.

As you suggested @DannyB , the custom amount is nice, but as soon as the bank connection catches my paycheck, it appears that I have double the money in the spending plan. Just played around with it a little bit more, and this might be my best option! I didn't realize it stopped using the calculation of all the income transactions! I will have to see how well this works!

Looking at the situation more, I guess my lazy side is showing. Getting into the app and tweaking transactions every once and a while, I could probably get both suggestions to work, but I was hopeful for an automated solution.

Thinking more about it, I was hopeful to use this as a budgeting app, but with the fluctuating income, it might find a better place using it as a spending tracking app.