Hello - Budget/Spending plan suggestions (edited)

Paul321

Hello. I'm new to Quicken Simplifi. It's good to be here.

My goal is to create and stick to a budget/spending plan. I have set up the accounts, categories, spending plan, savings goals, and watch list, and I'm monitoring it to ensure everything is working.

I just chatted with customer support to see if I could manage my cash flow by seeing everything on a line graph (income, bills, savings, and planned expenses). I see the projected cash flow graph in the accounts and bills and payments, but it only has bill reminders. I see the spending plan, but it only gives a month-by-month view. I was told there was no way to do this. I'll have to use the spending plan. I told the "coach" to submit a request to be able to do this.

Also, I suggested adding a button at the top of the spending plan page that says "This Month." Clicking this button would quickly take us to the current month, and we would not have to click the forward or backward buttons.

I'm sure these are not new to this community, but I thought I would share them with you.

Do you have any suggestions for a newbie?

Thanks!

RobWilk

The cash flow graph should have anything that is 'recurring' - known fixed dollar amount regular schedule expenses or income. IT could have income or expenses. However, some people would prefer it shows planned spending, but for example planned spending is 'monthly' (not a particular day) so it might be difficult for the developers to decide which day to apply these to the cash flow chart (If it subtracted them on the 1st, but payday wasn't until the 15th, things might look ugly). The other thing is planned spending doesn't apply to a particular account, whereas cash flow chart is per account.

Paul321

Hey @RobWilk . Thanks for the comment. I did not think about how a daily cash flow line graph would work for a monthly amount like planned expenses or how it would work across accounts. I wonder if a monthly cash flow line graph would work where we could choose among the accounts. For example, I would pull up a monthly cash flow line graph for my main checking account.

RobWilk

@Paul321 I suspect there are ways to make it work (on the Quicken team side), I was just pointing out difficulties with how things are set up 'now' if they were to do it. I'm not a Quicken developer, so I do not have the ability to even try to fix this.

ajbopp

The way that I work around this is to use planned spending only for the most discretionary things, like Entertainment (it's the only Planned Spending item that I have at the moment).

There are other things that I would like to track as Planned Spending, such as groceries, since the amount is so variable from week to week and month to month, but on the other hand groceries is such a significant budget item that I can't possibly leave it out of the cash flow report and have it mean anything. So I decided on what I can afford on groceries and make it a recurring bill. It's never correct, but at least it's reflected in the cash flow.

With this approach, I know exactly how much I can spend on something like Entertainment, regardless of what I have it set to in Planned Spending. For instance, I can see that in two months my checking account is going to be in the red. That tells me that $0 can be spent on Entertainment this month and next, even though I have $50 set aside for it in Planned Spending each of those months.

However, the Spending Plan shows that for both April and May, I will have more income than expenses. It's counter-intuitive, but it underscores why the cash flow report is so important, and gives a much better picture of the medium-to-long-term situation than the Spending Plan does.

Paul321

@ajbopp Thanks for the suggestion. I think I'll keep doing what I'm doing (a handful of variable expenses) in the planned expenses (in the spending plan). I'm new and want to monitor it for a few months before making significant changes. I'll click month-to-month in the spending plan to see how I'm doing.

Flopbot

@ajbopp ,

Are you actually withdrawing money from your account and paying for groceries with cash, or do you just have a Recurring Series for the expected amount of spending on a card and delete the instance of the Recurring Series once the date is past sinceby that point, it’s not needed for the Projected Balance or Cash Flow charts?

ajbopp

I don't delete anything. As new transactions come in they get assigned to the recurring series. I haven't been doing this long, so maybe I'll discover that it doesn't work as well as I'm hoping, but Groceries are 25% of my budget, and I can't have that not reflected in the cash flow graph.