Rollover unused Spending Plan money [edited] (10 Merged Votes)

@MichaelSGreen Simplifi actually has a built in recurrence function for bills/subscriptions that can do (I think) weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, annually. I have a quarterly expense / investment that varies from quarter to quarter, but I have a recurring bill for the average amount set up quarterly. That impacts my spending plan for the relevant month. Not perfect for accruing if you're trying to save over time with a defined amount each month (might use a savings goal for that use case), but good for layering into your spending.

That said, I also would love to see rollover functionality layered into this application.

@Coach Natalie Have you heard anything about current status of this feature? I would be very excited to see this rolled out (especially if we could allocate "rollover" directly into savings goals for certain budgets (e.g., a discretionary budget for which unused portions automatically go into a Vacation savings goal or something).

While I see the Team seems to be working on this, as new potential user and some-to-be-Mint-exile, I really want to emphasize the importance of this feature —or something like it. As some community members have noted, I find it quite challenging to user Simplifi as budget tool. There are some great features here but without being able to roll over un-used fund within categories month to month, Simplifi seems to be monthly zero-based budgeting.

Adding my vote too. Coming from digital envelopes (Mvelopes, EveryDollar, YNAB, etc), this should be like not spending all the cash you have in an envelope, and your next month's funding of the "envelopes" just adds to what's still in there.

Please add rollovers to budgeting!

I LOVE the interface of Simplifi. The only missing feature that I really need is the ability to rollover each category, not just the whole spending planned amount for the amount. I came from mvelopes originally until it closed in Nov 2022, then I went to Ramsey's Every Dollar. ED has rollover categories but the interface is not very robust - such as no real reporting.

I'm a recent exile from Mint, and subscribed to Simplifi because I like a lot of what I saw. I couldn't imagine that there wasn't rollover functionality, and I spent a couple of weeks getting set up in other areas and getting familiar with the program. I assumed that I would run into a rollover function somewhere, but now I come to the forum and find out it doesn't exist, and people have been asking for it for literally years. This is a total deal breaker for me, and I'm now going to try and cancel my subscription and find some other platform that offers this basic and essential functionality.

This is missing table stakes IMO! Your spending plan is the crown jewel of the product and why I ultimately went with Simplifi over Empower when migrating from mint. (Also the mint import was nice!) Yet, how are you supposed to have a smart spending plan around things like Travel? Big but inconsistent spend where you are trying to stay under an ongoing rate. Car maintenance is another good example. Heck, I'd use this approach for a lot of discretionary spend like entertainment and shopping, too. I get there are a lot of implications to support this but it's NOTABLY missing even in a first-time onboarding, and will be a thorn in my side until it's fixed.

This is a must have!

Just to be clear, rollover is the antithesis of budgeting. Budgeting is a forward-looking function. What people here seem to be asking for is tracking spending, which is backwards looking, and trying to project the past into the future, which is not budgeting at all.

Budgeting is about what I can spend. Tracking spending is about what I have spent, so I should expect to spend that into the future.

The budget is an immovable object. It doesn't matter what you spend or don't spend in a month, aside from providing information into how you should adjust your budget. But a budget that has meaning cannot change on a monthly basis.

I'm also moving over from Mint. The lack of rollover is also a deal breaker for me as we use it to keep track of things like groceries, gas, etc. Is there any update on how soon this can be expected?

@Chrobrego OK, if that's what you mean by rollover then Q-Simplifi already has what you're looking for. Check out Savings Goals and that functionality will do everything you've indicated you want done.

@RJ_ As mentioned in the voting box of the first post of this thread, adding this functionality is currently in progress.

However, I'm uncertain if it will behave the way @Chrobrego and you describe (which is neither budgeting nor rolling over - what's being described is a slight variation on how Savings Goals currently behave - a regular accumulation of money into a particular bucket).

Rolling over is budgeting an amount, spending differently than that amount, and having the difference be reflected in the next budgeting period.

Fellow Bopp… You might be right about how budgeting works. And I definitely don't think it should FORCE things to work this way in the app, but it would be an nice option, and critical to the way I budget ('track') spending.

For example, if I do a good job of not eating out for a few months, I like the benefit of having some extra on a month when I'm eating out more. Or if I have an allowance for certain activities… saving that allowance over time for a month when I want to use more. I know that 'goals' do this somewhat, but it's hard to 'track' this sort of spending in goals.

In short, this might not be adhering to a strict definition of 'Budgeting' but it would nonetheless be very valuable to money management in our house. It's clear that many existing features in Simplifi are not strict 'budgeting' tools, but also tracking spending.

I appreciate that this feature is being worked on! I know it's not a trivial request. This app has everything else I need, so hopefully when this feature arrives we'll be able to switch over to it.

Goals, rollovers…. I don't care. I want to be able to SIMPLY add a date for a transaction and have Simplifi automatically budget for it. I also want money that is left over in a budget category to 'carry over' into the next month automatically without me having to do anything or 'release funds' or any other nonsenses. I don't need an entirely SEPARATE category called 'GOALS' which is clunky and just adds more weight to an already cumbersome app. Paying my annual Life Insurance bill is not a GOAL; it's a need. For something called 'Simplify', you would expect this app to attempt to minimize the amount of user inputs, but I find that I have to do a surprisingly large number of tasks to accomplish simple things that are more elegantly handled in other apps.

thanks. This my point though. You shouldn’t need an additional feature in Simplifi to do this. Just allow the budget categories to roll over into the next month. Simple and elegant solution. Solves a lot of user requests without adding feature bloat. This could be a feature than can be enabled or disabled too. It also should not be difficult to program. The fact that Simplify is taking four years reading this feature request with no action doesn’t give me confidence it will ever be implemented though. I keep trying out Simplify, but it doesn’t appear to meet my needs. I only come back because it’s cheap. I guess you get what you pay for.