Break down Annual/Bi-Annual Expenses to a monthly amount in Spending Plan [edited] (6 Merged Votes)

Absolutely ridiculous that you cannot split transactions into separate months in a platform that charges a monthly subscription. If I pre-pay an expense for the next quarter, I want to recognize that expense across the three months in the quarter that I am receiving the benefit. Not all in the month I paid for it. This is the most basic feature and utterly shocked Quicken does not know how to budget.

I agree. This should be a standard feature. I have some rather large expense items that I would like to amortize over >1 month period. For example, I pay for my kid's soccer program that runs from January - March (3 months) in January. Instead of having the entire expense in January, I would like to split the transaction evenly over the 3 months.

Is there any movement on this issue yet? Definitely a make or break for me to jump from Mint - either 1 of two options would work:

Being able to split a transaction across multiple months

OR

As mint does today, budge 1/6 for example of a semi annual auto insurance bill and have it incur the full amount on the 6th month. It can't be that hard to copy basic functionality over from Mint.

[removed] already allows this functionality, but unfortunately it can bare connect to financial institutions…Simplifi can connect to these institutions, but is missing this core functionality.

Yes, Simplifi should set aside money for less-than-monthly expenses and give the option to roll over unused planned spending. Two simple features that would make using Simplifi SO much better!

I just found some other threads on this topic which began in 2020! Doesn't look like Quicken is listening to their customers. 😓

My workaround is to create a fake monthly bill that never gets populated or finalized, exclude the yearly amounts from the spending plan but not reports, then to mark both the fake bill and the actual yearly transactons with a "yearly" custom tag.

That keeps the spending plan accurate during the month, and then when doing yearly reports we can verify the amounts match up with the tag. It's a little cumbersome but with a dozen+ yearly bills and subscriptions it's the least amount of work for me to keep track of.

I have seen this suggested a number of different places or ways, but effectively I am looking for a way to break down or re-allocate income or expense to another month or months. A great example is that my husband gets a quarterly bonus — not all of that is for that month's expenses, but should be allocated/split to the next two as well so that one month doesn't look like I have a surplus income of x but the next two are underfunded by y. Someone else's suggestion involved auto-splitting for non-monthly expenses (below) but ultimately it's the ability to split across a frequency by inputting an allocation frequency.

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/1199/break-down-annual-bi-annual-expenses-to-a-monthly-amount-in-spending-plan-edited-6-merged-votes/p1

Here is another related post pertaining to one-time expenses:

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/47735#Comment_47735

Hi Quicken Team,

I’ve used Simplifi for my monthly budgeting for about a year now, and I’ve struggled to understand how other folks incorporate large, non-monthly transactions into their Spending Plan. I’ve found these fall into two categories: regular (ex: semi-annual car insurance premiums) and irregular (ex: car repair). Perhaps for the latter you could set up a Savings Goal called “rainy day fund”, strive for some saved amount, and then when new expenses deplete the fund, you start contributing again in the months that follow to replenish it. But how to conveniently get the former into monthly Spending Plans? At least to me that sounds like a lot of work.

I think a feature within the Edit Transaction interface that allows you to do something like [“Distribute Expense” > (scroll wheel / numeric input to set number of months)] would be an easy single-click way to accomplish this. (I imagine it would always distribute forward in time, starting with the month of the date that the transaction is set to, which a user can already override.) And for Series that are defined as non-monthly, there should be a simple checkbox called something like “Distribute Evenly Across Months” such that, for example, a quarterly $300 expense series would show up as $100 in every month of Spending Plan.

I think this feature would really help folks to be better able to distinguish noise from meaningful insights when they see changes in monthly spending, as reported in the Spending Plan. And especially for folks like me that have very regular monthly income, this would make the $ left at the end of each month a much more meaningful datapoint because it normalizes non-monthly expenses into the monthly format of the Spending Plan

(I’m sure I haven’t thought this through perfectly for all use cases, so very happy to start a discussion and get other user or developer insights!)

@JSH

Currently you do have the option of setting up a non-monthly expense in Planned Spend using the rollover feature. So technically, the ability to include annual, semi-annual fixed and even non-monthly flexible expense in our monthly spending plans is available in QS. Have you tried using the rollover feature? I'd be interested to hear about your experience.

using the Planned Spend rollover feature is moves a fixed expenses like an annual insurance premium or property tax payment from Bills (fixed) to Planned Spend (flexible), but they are still in the Spending Plan.

@DryHeat

So, if you use Rollover to fund a Recurring Series Bill, how you "move [that] payment from Bills (fixed) to Planned Spend (flexible)"?

The sentence of mine you quote is indeed garbled and ambiguous for sure. Let me rephrase it:

"Using the Planned Spend rollover feature moves a fixed expense like an annual insurance premium or property tax payment from Bills (fixed) to Planned Spend (flexible), but they are still in the Spending Plan. If you have an annual bill set up as a recurring series, you will need to delete that series and set up a Planned Spend bucket to cover that expense when it comes due."

In other words, I agree 100% with your set up and understanding. We cannot set up any expenses we want to track in Planned Spend as a recurring series for the reasons you point out. If we want to use the rollover feature in Planned Spend to account for non-monthly fixed expenses in our monthly Spending Plan, we cannot set them up as a recurring series.

Therefore, none of my fixed annual expenses are set up as recurring series so that when they get paid, they will be counted against the Planned Spend bucket as you make clear. In my understanding of how the Spending Plan works this is the only way Planned Spend will work for these expenses.

@DryHeat

I'll look forward to hearing how this works out for you.