Weekly Expense Paid at End of Month

Mattman

Hello,

I'm still fairly new to Simplifi and working through some of the nuances of it. I'm wondering if the capability exists for a weekly expense to accumulate throughout the month and get paid at the end of the month?

For example, my landscapers come every month at charge us $150 per week, but want us to pay them in whole at the end of the month via check. So Simplifi sees the check and doesn't seem to like splitting that payment 4 (or sometimes 5) different ways to cover the expenses. I've thought to just create an once a month expense of $600 on the last Monday of the month, but sometimes there are 5 Mondays in a month. Is there a way for Simplifi to take this into account? And automatically adjust the expense to $750 for those months that have 5 Mondays? If not, I guess my only option at this point is to input a monthly expense of $600 for the last Monday of the month and manually update it for those months that have 5 Mondays.

Flopbot

@Mattman

For this, I personally would try one of two options:

1. Create a ‘Savings Goal’ to set aside the weekly $150 portion. Depending on how hands off you want to be with Simplifi, this could be slightly annoying because there’s currently no automation built into the Savings Goal feature…yet. I hold out hope that it will eventually. For now though, you’d have to make weekly manual deposits into the Savings Goal.
2. Create a second, real world Checking Account or a Savings Account at the same bank that you’ll pay the check from. Then schedule real world transfers between the accounts as necessary. You can then set these up as Recurring Series and the Simplifi side gets pretty much fully automated. I’m most recently trying this as a way to set aside or segregate our grocery money so it doesn’t accidentally get spent on other necessities. This is my workaround till Savings Goals get automated.
   

Hopefully others in this forum will come up with great ideas for you.

Coach Jon

Hello @Mattman,

Thanks for reaching out! You can definitely set up a recurring transaction for a monthly expense on the last Monday of each month. To do so, when creating the Recurring Series you will want to set the Frequency to 'Every month', and then set it to 'Day of the Week' within the series, choosing Monday as the specified day. Finally, you can set the occurrence in the series to be the Last Monday of each month. See the screenshot below to verify how I set this up.

As for splitting the transaction, you cannot do this within the recurring series setup, but we do have a good idea post you can vote for here that covers that idea.

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/98/using-splits-multiple-categories-in-recurring-transactions-4-merged-votes

After the transaction is linked to the reminder in Quicken Simplifi, you may split it however you want, however, you will want to do it after it's linked or you will lose your splits.

I hope this helps going forward!

-Coach Jon

DannyB

@Mattman

150×52=7800/12=650.

That 5th Monday happens what 2 or 3 times a year?

Two options I would consider are:

1. Set up a recurring expense for this payment for the last Monday of the month as @Coach Jon points out, and in the 2 o 3 months there is a 5th Monday simply adjust the amount for that month. You can do this in advance by scrolling forward through the next twelve months and edit the reminder in the 5th Monday months so the extra amount is already built into your monthly Spending Plans.
2. Set up a Planned Spending bucket with rollover enabled and set the Monthly target amount at $650. This will allow you to accumulate funding during the 4 week months to be used in the 2 or 3 months you need the extra 150.

Either of these, I think would work well for you.