Contributing to a goal doesn't update the "This Month" amount or the Spending Plan (edited)

rpulivarti · February 2

Setting aside January's issues with Goals, I encountered another issue in February 2026.

I made a contribution feb 2, 2026, the goal balance increased by the correct amount but:

The "This Month" amount under the "Monthly Contributions" section of the Goal does not show the contribution dollars
The "Spending Plan" was not affected by the contribution

This was a one-off as the second goal contribution did work correctly.

At this point, I’m struggling to determine whether I’m misunderstanding how Goals are intended to work or whether the feature itself is unstable. The recurring issues and unpredictable behavior are significantly undermining my ability to reliably track savings for special projects, as well as surplus or overspending within my monthly budget.

Additionally, I don’t understand why itemized transactions associated with Goals are inaccessible. This lack of transparency makes it extremely difficult to troubleshoot discrepancies—or to reverse an incorrect contribution or withdrawal due to a simple typo.

Has anyone identified a reliable alternative for tracking savings for special projects or managing surplus/overspending within monthly budgets?

Overall, this has been an extremely frustrating experience—particularly given that my annual renewal occurred in early January.

DryHeat · February 2

@rpulivarti

I made a contribution feb 2, 2026, the goal balance increased by the correct amount but:
(1) The "This Month" amount under the "Monthly Contributions" section of the Goal does not show the contribution dollars

(2) The "Spending Plan" was not affected by the contribution

I understand what you mean by (1). A contribution should definitely show up there if it was made.

But regarding (2), do you mean that the contribution doesn't show up in the total (outlined in red), or in the monthly amount (outlined in blue), or doesn't show up in either one?

If the contribution isn't showing up anywhere at all, then maybe your attempt to make the contribution wasn't successful for some reason. (As you mentioned, our inability to see Goal transactions makes this harder than it should be.) Did you make it on the Savings Goals page or in the Goals section of Spending Plan?

Or do you mean that the contribution didn't affect the Spending Plan's "Left this month" amount? If that's the case, then I wouldn't worry because making the planned contribution should not affect that amount as the planned contributions are already taken into account in its calculation.

rpulivarti · February 3

@DryHeat

Thank you for taking the time to help me with this.

The contribution did take as the goal balance, indicated by the "saved so far" value, was incremented by the amount I contributed. What was broken were the areas indicating that a contribution was made:

For the goal in question it showed "not contributed" within the spending plan view:

and the spending plan, specifically the available balance, was not decremented by the amount contributed to the goal.

My planned contributions for goals are set to zero are they are variable each month such as budget surpluses/deficits. Historically, when I make an ad-hoc goal contribution, it decrements the available balance of spending.

I created a "Test" goal to illustrate my point:

Here is how I created the goal without a planned monthly contribution:

I then made an ad-hoc contribution of $1000. The goal view within the Spending Plan correctly shows the amount I've contributed like shown below. However, In the issue I experienced when I posted the issue yesterday, the "contributed" indicator or the "-1000" contribution amount did not change :

The spending plan was decremented by $1000:

Here's the spending plan available balance before the test contribution:

Here's the spending plan available balance after the contribution. It's $1000 less. This was not my experience when I did this yesterday:

Let me know your thoughts.

Again, appreciate your time helping me out. I've now resorted to maintaining a ledger of the goal transactions in a spreadsheet for the time being. This helps me with seeing the itemized transactions as well the ability to recreate goals and their respective balances when things go awry.

I'm going try out Mon@rch as I've read it handles goals better?? If Quicken doesn't have an answer I've accepted that I will take a loss of the 1 year membership and move on. It sucks as I had high hopes since switching from Mint to Simplifi but I've spent more time than I wanted double-checking things that the app should be doing correctly :(

DryHeat · February 3

@rpulivarti

I'm afraid I have little to offer on this. I may be missing something, but it sounds like you did the same thing in two different Savings Goals and got two different results.

As I understand it, in both the original and the test Goals:

the monthly contribution amount for the Goal was set to $0.00
you made a contribution this month
the contribution shows up in the Goal by increasing the "saved so far" amount

BUT…

the contribution to the original Goal did not decrease your Spending Plan "available" amount
the contribution to the new test Goal did decrease your Spending Plan "available" amount

It is possible that your original Goal was affected by some changes made to Simplifi in the last few days in an attempt to fix problems that showed up recently. The test Goal may have escaped that fate because it was just created. Those problems are described in the very long thread below:

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/15477/incorrect-balances-and-savings-goals-for-all-manually-tracked-accounts-and-assets-edited

Other than that, I'm out of ideas.

Contributing to a goal doesn't update the "This Month" amount or the Spending Plan (edited)

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