I would like the option to choose to apply over/underspending to the next month's category or automatically rollover to the starting place for next month. YNAB does this well.Flopbot said:
1. How would you use rollover abilities in the Spending Plan? I would certainly use the ability to rollover BOTH overages & underages for specific Spending Plan items - not all - from one month to the next in the Spending Plan. I used this in Quicken Desktop and really liked it - although the rest of the budget module in Quicken left some to be desired. Here's an example of how I'd use it. This month, I had to purchase a Wi-Fi Router so this is what shows up in my Planned Spending for Entertainment (which includes Electronics). If I had rollover active, I'd be able to see that next month - if I didn't spend any money - I had a negative balance of $125.75 over. The following month would be $115.75 over. And so on. By keeping an eye on this number over the course of several months, I'd have a pretty good idea of whether I had too much or too little budgeted for Entertainment - if it's always negative, then I need to budget more.
2. How would having rollover abilities benefit you? For me, in Quicken Desktop, it helped me know if I had too much or too little budgeted in any given category. The way that Simplifi is set up doesn't really give a clear big picture of how my budget is doing. There are too many oddities like this that I just can't seem to plan for.
3. What other features/abilities would you like to see added to the Spending Plan? The two that I'd want to see the most would be:
(A) The ability to EASILY move unused money from one Spending Plan item to another (click here). I feel this would become especially critical if you added the ability to rollover amounts from one month to the next. Using my example above, if I realized I wasn't paying down the "Entertainment" category fast enough, then maybe I'd want to move $50 from my "Clothing & Shoes" category to get it done faster. Along with this, I'd love the ability to see a record of when this was done, which was something that was lacking in Quicken Desktop.
I would also like the Spending Plan to have a feature to auto-apply an amount based on past spending, upcoming spending, or past spending plan amounts.