Best way to track irregular/quarterly income

jeggen

I have an income stream that includes a base and a reimbursable amount each month, but it's not paid monthly. In theory the funds should be paid quarterly but that's not always the case. When funds are received they will be recorded as income, and reimbursement amount categorized against the expenses. The problem is though that some months my spending plan looks horrible, and some months it will look great, based on whether or not this payment was received. Is there a way to track what is due to me so it appears as income in the spending plan in the month it is due while also keeping track of what's due and reconciling that with payments when they come? It sounds complicated to describe but it can't be that unusual so hoping for some advice.

DannyB

Hi @jeggen

Interesting question and scenario.

Here are a couple of my thoughts about how you might accomplish this or at least somewhere to start.

First, did you notice that you can set up recurring income with a quarterly interval and you are given quite a few choices about how to set the interval. Not having used something like a quarterly recurring income setting, I don't know how it is distributed to the Spending Plan my by initial suspicion is that it will show up in the Spending Plan in the month it actually arrives and won't be spread out over the next several month's plans.

My other idea is to receive the income but exclude it from your Spending Plan and move it to a savings account. Then I would set up a monthly recurring transfer from the savings account to your checking account. I would exclude the transfer out of savings account and include the transfer in to the savings account. I think this would allow you to spread the income over several months of the Spending Plan and should smooth things out.

As far as tracking the reimbursables, it probably depends on how you are categorizing those now. You could breakout the amount that covers the reimbursable and treat them as a refund back to that expense categories.

jeggen

@DannyB Thanks for the advice. This got me thinking - I added pending transactions to the savings account I use, and will eventually deposit the funds into, for each of these transactions based on the month the money was "due." It doesn't appear to artificially inflate the balance in Simplifi, maybe because they are pending, but they do impact the spending report for the month they were recorded. Basically it seems as though it's a way to use accrual accounting for the spending plan. I'm wondering though when I get the deposit if I will be able to match it up to several transactions and mark them as cleared. I'm going to test this out, but thoughts on whether this might work or just really screw things up?

Coach Jon

Hello @jeggen,

Thanks for posting to the community! Pending transactions set with a future date will not be included in your balance, but any with a current or prior date will count toward your account balance. You can also disable Quicken Simplifi from counting pending transactions towards your balance. This is stated in our article here: https://help.simplifimoney.com/en/articles/4202003-how-to-resolve-balance-discrepancies

When creating a pending transaction, you also can exclude it from the Spending Plan and Reports in Quicken Simplifi by checking the 'Exclude from' boxes in the Create transaction window.

Hope this information helps!

Thanks,

Coach Jon