Add an alert for negative 'balances' in the Savings Goals > By Account page (edited)
A bit of a complicated edge case, but here goes: when I withdraw money from the underlying account without making a corresponding withdrawal from a savings goal, the "By Account" pie charts don't turn orange like the Spending Plan charts, instead they show the amount that's 'virtually overspent' as a gray wedge (ie leaving off the negative sign).
Example with numbers:
I have a monthly doctor's appointment with a $60 copay, which sometimes bills me several months at a time instead of immediately after the visit. The first time this happened after I switched to Simplifi this year, I set up a Savings Goal to use as a sinking fund, so that it wouldn't send me over my Spending Plan health category (yes, the gamification is working on me :P ).
Status as of December: create Savings Goal, contribute $300 from checking account, spend & withdraw $240, mark that check 'hide from Spending Plan', set monthly contributions to savings goal at $60 included in spending plan
Fast forward to March, I also have a FSA which I set up as a manual account since it doesn't offer a link option, and I've allocated $60 of it to the copay sinking fund. Say for ease of math it has $180 in it, so the $60 shows up as a purple wedge a third the way around. Now I finally get the reimbursement for my December check processed, and the $180 moves from my FSA account to my checking account, leaving the FSA with a $0 balance but $60 allocated to goals. Now it should have an orange overspent pie, but instead it's half gray and half purple, showing $60 allocated and $60 available to save. (Same thing happens with nonzero amounts: ie if it had $90 in the account and I allocated $120, it should be showing me an orange circle to indicate 1/3 overspent, but instead it appears 4/5 purple and 1/5 gray.)
(It would also be nice to have some way of moving allocated savings from one account to another as I move money between the underlying accounts, but I assume that should be a separate feature request?)
Comments
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Hello @Emacken,
Thanks for reaching out to the community! To help paint a clearer picture of your situation, could you please attach some screenshots showing the pie charts, and where the issue resides regarding them? This would help us to better understand.
Thank You,
Coach Jon
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Sorry I missed this! I rearranged the money in my savings goals so my charts stopped being wrong, but here's some recreated images:
Step 1, I created a fake $200 balance adjustment for the FSA, then allocated $50 of it to a random goal:
Step 2, I deleted the +200 transaction, returning the account balance to 0:
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Sorry, I may not have been clear- the issue is not fixed, see the screenshots I posted. Here's another example:
I assigned $120 to the goal, then moved 'money' out of the underlying account so it has a balance of $90: it should be showing that I have more money saved than actually exists, but instead it's showing the negative $30 as though it was positive $30.
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Hello @Emacken,
I think there may be some confusion here. Based on your screenshot and the information given, the program is working as intended. Transactions themselves do not correlate with savings goal contributions, only the account balances themselves. Does this make more sense now?
Thanks,
Coach Jon
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Sorry, that doesn't make sense to me at all- could you go into more detail?
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Hello @Emacken,
I can definitely go into more detail. When using Savings goals, only direct contributions toward a goal will be counted, not the transactions in your accounts themselves. The trasactions only affect your account balances in Quicken Simplifi.
I hope this helps clear up any confusion.
Thanks,
Coach Jon
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Ah, I think I see now- you're talking about linking a transaction to automatically withdraw from a savings goal? That would be nice, but that's an unrelated feature request, not a bug report- I'm talking about the pie chart displayed being incorrect.
In the most recent screenshot, instead of showing $30 available to save, when the account is actually over allocated, it should show an orange "alert" chart, such as when you overspend on the spending plan (not going to include a screenshot since that has my actual numbers, and presumably you know what the spending plan looks like).
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Sorry, I'm a bit confused- are you saying that displaying a negative balance as positive is intended behavior?
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Hello @Emacken,
Thank you for your reply. Using your screenshot as an example, can you let us know how it is displaying a negative balance as a positive? It sounds to us that you want the amount to be set up like an alert would to show that it is negative. Let us know!
Thanks,
Coach Jon
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I don't have any preference about what kind of alert, or whether there is an alert, or anything like that; that was just an example of the sort of behavior I would expect to find here. If you look at the most recent screenshot, the pie chart has a gray wedge: that gray wedge is what should not be there, since all the available money in the account has been allocated.
It looks to me as though whatever function is producing the pie chart doesn't have a way to handle negative numbers the way the Spending Plan pie chart does, and so it includes the negative $30 as though it was positive $30 and indicates that $30 is Available To Save, when in fact it is over-allocated. Does that make sense?
(As a side note, is it possible to turn this thread back into a bug report? I didn't intend for it to be a feature request, and would have written the initial post differently if so.)
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I agree, this should not be a feature request. This chart is displaying information that is not correct and is a bug. Please change it back.
$30 is not available, it is over extended.
Let's say I put ten $10 bills in an envelope and write "$100 Total" on the envelope.
Then, a couple of days later, I take three of those bills out of the envelope and draw a line through what I had previously written and write a new line that says "$100 - $30 Available" on the envelope. What does that mean?
What I should write on the envelope, in red letters, is "$100 - $30 short." That lets me know that there's only $70 in the envelope and I need to make up a $30 shortfall.
Anthony Bopp
Simplifi User Since July 2022Money talks. But all my paycheck ever says is goodbye0 -
@Emacken, thanks for posting to the Community regarding this behavior!
Since what you're currently seeing in regard to this is the expected design, we'll go ahead and leave this as a Feature Request. Our product team is currently reviewing how to go about showing negative balances in Savings Goals, so this request has been marked as "In Review". This will best allow us to keep everyone updated as our product team works on these design changes.
I hope this helps!
-Coach Natalie
SIMPL-20692
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