Spouse/Couple/Roommate mode for easy way to manage transactions between two people (edited)
I am hoping someone else here might have similar experience to mine and has some suggestions (or perhaps Simplifi Team has ideas?).
I live with my girlfriend and we share expenses. More often than not one of us will pay for food (groceries, eating out, etc.) while the other covers rent, bills, etc. End of each month we sum everything up and transfer to the other person the net difference.
The problem is that Simplifi doesn't know any of this, and therefore all reports are incorrect/inaccurate. (Not intentionally incorrect, but I'm looking for ways to easily correct it). In essence, since I paid all of rent, simplifi shows that as my monthly rent expense (even though in reality I only pay half). Furthermore, sine I didn't have any food related transactions, Simplifi doesn't see this as a monthly trend. Finally, when my girlfriend transfers me the net difference, it shows up as "transfer/income", which again is inaccurate. Now I can obviously mark the transfer as food expenses, but in reality, I need to somehow split all my shared transactions into half and have Simplifi ignore them. Then I need to figure out a way to add all food expenses to be able to accurately track that.
I'm just curious if there is a an easy to way to mark this up in Simplifi so the reports are accurate?
Comments
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Hi @nichodamous,
Thanks for reaching out for some suggestions! I've spent some time trying to figure out the best possible way to accurately track the transactions so you can report properly and sadly I've not found an easy way. Based on your description, it sounds like the best option is to add splits to all transactions that you share with your significant other. I recommend creating a specific category that you can easily track. Here is an example of what the split would look like:
In this example, Simplifi would only pull in the $750.00 as your Rent payment in the spending reports.
I hope this information helps! Let me know if you have any questions!
Thank you!
Coach Nicole2 -
Hiya Nicole. Thanks for responding. That's what I've been doing, but sadly I cannot track "the other side". I.e. i can split and ignore half of my payments, but I would also then need to manually add half of all expenses by my partner to be able to accurately show reports on groceries, eating out, home supplies, etc.
I think perhaps best way would be for couples to have a "shared" credit card, that is added to Simplifi and then split those into half. So perhaps a "Spouse/Couple mode" can be added where a given credit card automatically splits and ignores half of all transactions? That would be awesome!0 -
Hello @nichodamous,
I have gone ahead and turned this into an Idea post, requesting that a Spouse/Couple mode be added to Simplifi, so that other Users can vote on it. Please be sure to add your vote as well!
-Coach Natalie
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Just signed up for Simplifi and then realized my wife and I can't exactly share the account, I can only have her log in as me on her devices. I also looked for info on whether you can run the app on two devices at once and didn't see anything so I'm unsure how that would work. The optimum would be to have individual users sharing the same account so we can each log in using our own credentials to check and make updates to our mutual budget.
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Please add this support. Your competitor (founder of [removed]) offers it in [removed]0
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How might I find this Idea post in order to vote on it? @Coach Natalie
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FYI, I think I was finally able to make a workaround that works for me.
I'm wanting to get an overview of my personal expenses. But my partner and I have one credit card for our shared expenses. I do not want his portion (50%) of our credit card expenses to end up on my reports. So I went the manual route, that requires I input items monthly.First I added a manual account to Simplifi for our credit card (I did not authorize a connection to the credit card account).Then, I downloaded the credit card's monthly statement as a csv (spreadsheet) file. I amended the spreadsheet to show half of the charged amount. (I added a formula to change the Amount to 50% of what the actual total was to reflect my portion. I deleted the original amount). I then formatted the CSV file the way Simplifi wants. (Headings are: Date, Payee, Amount, Tags). (I also deleted the line that reflected my payment for the last month's balance, but I think I could have also deleted this in Simplifi.) I uploaded the new CSV to the manual credit card account I had set up. Voila! ...I did have to categorize the transactions manually, but I also set rules, so maybe it will recognize the payee's next time?Although it's somewhat of an annoying workaround, I'm glad I found an answer, and I am wiling to do this once a month. Hopefully this helps someone else with this issue!
Simplifi's import CSV info:http://help.simplifimoney.com/en/articles/4413430-how-to-import-transactions
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I connected the joint credit card to Simplifi. The charges that are only my spouse’s I set to ignore. For charges that we are splitting, I manually add a transaction on the same day to the same category that is a credit for half of the amount. It works for me, but is still a pain to put in manual transactions. Having the ability to create a split and then ignore part of it seems like it would solve the problem. She many people share expenses, roommates share rent, dinner checks are split with friends, etc. This a really a feature missing from Simplifi.0
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I have a shared credit card with my wife. We split the costs of everything equally. But this wreaks havoc on my Simplifi account because it thinks I'm spending too much when in reality I'm only paying for half of the spending. My overarching accounts get corrected when she pays me for her half of the spending, but everything else is messed up.
It basically makes most of Simplifi's functionality useless to me.0 -
I also have the same issue with my roommate. I’ve worked out the split on the bill, but I doesn’t help me with my budget since my expenses are shown as more than they truly are. It would be handy if you could have a split transaction with a toggle that will “remove from spending plan”and “remove from reports”. That way the half I’m responsible for will be in my spending plan and the other half will be ignored.0
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Totally agree! This seems like it should almost be its own suggestion!
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crosspost from the reddit. New to simplifi so also open to suggestions on how to hack this with existing features.
One thing I do constantly is pay for meals, rent, utilities, groceries, etc that I split with my roommates. In mint what I would do is split the transaction, with my portion counting towards whatever category, and the rest going to "hidden". Some sort of feature to auto hide an arbitrary percentage of a transaction would be awesome for this situation. Here is a crude visualization
I think lots of users would find this super useful
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My spouse and I have both individual and joint accounts, allowing us to handle shared expenses together and personal expenses separately. This means I am responsible for a specific fraction of all transactions in the joint accounts, and my wife and I don't worry about expenses in each others' personal accounts.
Currently, Simplifi treats these accounts as "fully mine", and there is no automatic-splitting functionality.
It would be ideal for us (and those with similar arrangements) to mark an account with "Only consider <pct> of each transaction in my Spending Plan" and "Only consider <pct> of this account's value in my Net Worth".
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I split all the costs that are charged on one of my credit cards equally with my partner. Right now, I have to go through and manually adjust the charge amount so that it displays half of the amount so that my spending is accurate. It would be such a timesaver if there was a setting where I could set a rule for a certain account to have it show only a certain percentage of the charges/balance. In my case, I would set one of my credit cards to show 50% of the amount for each charge.
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This would be a super helpful feature! I was a Mint user for several years and loved being able to hide parts of split transactions. A percentage setting would be great too
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