I find this very hard to work with

DudeInCO · September 3

I am finding this software very hard to work with in order to manage my money and budget. My bank pays me a couple of days early, and I get paid on the first of the month….well, that shows up as income for the previous month, and I want it to show for my budget for the next month, which would be the first of the month. I have to manually change the dates on order for it to show up.

My mortgage company will not connect directly to the software, and when I add my mortgage as an account manually, there is no way for me to track my mortgage payments against my mortgage, and there is no way to track the interested or any details of the mortgage. That is just a couple of the issues that I have.

Am I just not seeing how to do what I want or is this a limitation of the software?

SRC54 · September 3

I would say that changing the date to the first of the month should be fine. Simplifi will always use the bank's date, but you can fudge a little.

As far as your manual mortgage account, you can keep up with payments and interest in it. You can create a liability account, and just enter the transactions yourself. There are various ways you can do this.

You can make a transfer from your checking account to the Mortgage account and then split it into principal and interest. Or you can just do a simple transfer and then add an expense transaction each month for interest.

https://support.simplifi.quicken.com/en/articles/4593261-loan-liability-tracking-in-quicken-simplifi

There's lots of ways to do this. Just start working on it and post any questions you have here. Good luck.

TheReal702 · September 3

I have a similar issue with a utility bill that is due on the 30th of each month. I have it set up on auto-pay, but I can't change the date the bill gets paid. The city will only hit my checking account on the due date, but it won't show as pending in my checking account until a few days into the next month.

It would be easier to manage if I could make a rule in Simplifi that allowed for an automatic date change for this transaction.

DryHeat · September 4

@TheReal702

The city will only hit my checking account on the due date, but it won't show as pending in my checking account until a few days into the next month.

I have a couple of auto-pay bills that are technically due on the last day of the month but don't show up in my checking account until the 1st or 2nd. For example, my bill that is supposedly due Aug 31 always ends up with a date of Sept 1 or 2 in Simplifi.

On bills like that, I just let the transaction stick with the Sept date and consider it part of my September Spending Plan. Whichever way I do it, as long as I am consistent I end up with only one bill in each month… so the numbers work out the same.

There's probably some good reason to try to make the dates match up exactly. But I do it this way partly because I am lazy but also because I don't like to make manual entries. A lot of problems in Simplifi happen because of manual transactions not matching correctly when the downloaded transaction shows up. I want to avoid that.

TheReal702 · September 4

I with you on that @DryHeat

Once I quit trying to master Simplifi and just let it do its thing on full-auto it has worked quite well for me. I occasionally look at the spending plan data but since it has never worked accurately for me I largely ignore it.

DryHeat · September 4

A lot of folks don't find the Spending Plan very useful, @TheReal702, but I check it a couple of times a week.

It works for me partly because my income is very regular. My expenses run about 35% Bills, 35% Planned Spend, 20% Other Spend, and 10% Savings Goals. I use the Spending Plan to keep tabs on how the 3 planned sections are going (Bills, Planned Spend, and Savings Goals) and to make sure that the unplanned part (Other Spend) isn't getting out of hand. I find it a good motivator.

SRC54 · September 4

My local bank drives me crazy with the monthly interest, which shows up the last day of the month, but whenever, that is a weekend, they date it on the last day of the weekend, which can be the 1st.

BUT the money is already in my available balance that is downloaded to Simplifi. So I have to manually add the transaction and clear it. I set it on the last day of the month but on the first (sometimes late on the first), Simplifi will download the transaction, match it and change the date to the first. I change it back.

This past Labor Day was one of those weekends, and sure enough, they paid the interest officially on the first.

But in December they always pay the interest by the 31st so it's on this year's taxes. If they ever officially pay on 1 January, I will have to stick with that date unless of course it is on the 1099-INT. So far that hasn't happened.

There must be some weird accounting reason they put it on the 1st instead of 30/31!

SRC54 · September 4

Oh, and another thing on which I meant to comment to @DudeInCO was that we get our income very late in the month in my household (I think this is typical for people on monthly income.) And I do use the Spending Plan a lot and so I appreciate that it has my projected income there so it doesn't look stupid as I pile up expenses with no income until the 4th Wednesday!

I didn't have that in Quicken Classic and even on the Dashboard in Quicken Simplifi, you can see no green in the income card for several weeks. You catch up just in time to start a new month. So I've often been tempted to move the income to the first but it won't work in December if you want your tax report to be correct the the year.

I remember a couple of years when my wife and I worked in this school system that for accounting reasons changed the payday from the last day of the month to the first day of the next month, and I had to move the date back to make my monthly budget work! And yes in December, they always paid before Christmas so it worked out right on the W-2.

I find this very hard to work with

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