How do you fund & manage planned spend categories (edited)

Robert48314 · February 24

My wife and I have many (over a 100) gift sub-categories, that I was tracking the expenses on for 3 years in Quicken Classic, that the subscription expires the end of next month.

The problem is my wife and I really never did anything with all the data from tracking all those expenses, even though we tried using the Quicken Classic app on our phones, but 3 times my Quicken Classic data file on my computer got corrupted, due to the synchronization issues that Quicken Classic has with online synchronization, and 3 times I had to get Quicken Classic support involved to resolve that data corruption, so I decided to switch to Simplifi Personal a few days ago, after briefly trying YNAB for only a few days.

My goal is to fund all our gift sub-sub-categories, such as birthday, Christmas & anniversary, for example "Gifts-Birthday-Josh (SEP) $100".

I have the sub-sub category named on purpose with the month it's needed, along with the amount we plan to spend.

For the example above, I know this is February, and I know we need $100 to spend on Josh's birthday, that's in September.

If I had my choice, I'd prefer to fund that category $100 now, so if either my wife and I are out shopping somewhere, and we come across something we'd like to buy for Josh's birthday, we can open the Simplifi app on our phone, navigate to that spending sub-category, and see how much is available in that sub-category, and if the item we'd like to purchase fits into the funds available in that sub-category, we can purchase it, and then record that transaction on the spot.

If it's not funded now, before the due date of Josh's birthday, then in the example above, if we're shopping in May, there won't be enough money in Josh's birthday sub-category to cover a $90 purchase for Josh's birthday, otherwise it will show overspent until September arrives.

Same thing for all our Christmas sub-categories, my wife frequently finds things to buy for Christmas all year long.

Also in the example above, when September 1st, or the last day in September comes around, I'd like that category to be replenished with $100 automatically.

I worked with Simplifi phone support yesterday, and shared my screen for 2-1/2 hours, to address the numerous questions I had getting Simplifi setup, and configured the way I wanted it, but they weren't able to come up with a solution to funding annual reoccurring spending categories, tracking, and replenishing them.

Had anyone here found a solution that makes sense and works to keep your gift spending on track?

SRC54 · February 24

I will just get the ball rolling for you by saying that I think you are attempting to use categories in a way not intended in Simplifi. It sounds like you want sub-accounts that you can fund and Simplifi doesn't support that. But I didn't know that Quicken Classic supported sub-accounts so I cannot quite conceptualize what you were doing. Also, it is true that Classic used to get corrupted easily when synching online, but I haven't had any problem in years. Sometimes I have to reset the Cloud by re-uploading the data from the app's physical file.

Nevertheless, there are different ways you might handle your situation in Simplifi. If they are annual expenses, you can use the Spending Plan to create an annual expense set in November/December for Christmas Presents. You could do the same for Josh's birthday. If you bought a present early, you could still link it to Josh's Presents anytime. You just have to do it manually.

Another way would be to create cash accounts and put money in them. This is a bit artificial since you wouldn't really have money in them unless you used cash. You could also open small savings accounts at a bank such as a Christmas Club Account. Then when you bought something for say $90, you would make it a transfer instead of an expense from the Christmas account.

Another possible way to do this is with Savings goals that you put "money into" and "take money out of". I don't use Savings goals so I can not be to specific on how to do that. But no doubt many users here do, and can give you some pointers IF that is possible as I suspect.

So mull this over while we wait for other users to do similar things who can be more specific and probably more helpful. In any event, setting up 100 of these sound daunting.

I will follow this conversation because I enjoy hearing how different folks handle accounting situations.

DryHeat · February 24

Can you clarify what you mean by "I'd prefer to fund that category $100 now"? I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to accomplish … unless, as @SRC54 said, you are thinking of expense categories as sub-accounts. You may want to review the Simplifi docs on the Spending Plan, as it does not function like a typical budget.

As for the 100 sub-categories… I think what you said about "my wife and I really never did anything with all the data" is important. For myself, I don't see much point in spending the time and effort to finely categorize expenses if I am not going to use that categorization for some purpose.

Anyway, here's how I personally handle gifts in order to make sure I have the funds in my Spending Plan. In January, I look at what I spent all of last year on gifts of all kinds. Then I put a Planned Expense for my Gifts category in my monthly Spending Plan for roughly 1/12th of that amount, and I set that Planned Expense to roll over each month.

Here's how that works. For simplicity, let's say that the monthly amount is $100 and that in January and February I don't spend any of it. The $100 is still counted in those two months as a planned expense so my Spending Plan takes it into account if figuring out how much I can spend on other things. In a sense, it is "set aside." Then, in March, I will have $300 available in that planned expense ($100 new and $200 rollover). When I buy gifts, that $300 amount is reduced and can even go negative (which will also be rolled over to the next month).

The idea is that, over the course of the year, the amount you "set aside" for gifts each month through the planned expense will roughly equal what you actually spend, no matter when you actually spend it.

(Some people use Savings Goals for this purpose, but there have been a number of problems with that. You can search the discussions for more info on that issue.)

Robert48314 · February 25

SRC54,

First of all that's the first time I've heard that the Quicken Classic sync with the phone apps has been resolved!

I had two separate support staff tell me on the phone to stop using online sync because of the data sync problem that we had happen 3 separate times.

If I had a choice, and the online sync problem was fixed with Quicken Classic and the phone app, I'd definitely consider staying with Quicken Classic, as I like it a lot on my laptop, but unfortunately I've never used the budgeting and tracking what we spend in that budget, we've only used expense tracking for the last 3 years.

I think I'm going to call Quicken Classic support, and ask them if they feel the Quicken Classic online synchronization has been resolved with the desktop product and phones, and see if they have changed their recommendation about using online synchronization.

I'm not quite sure what you mean when you state sub-accounts. In Quicken Classic, just like what I'm seeing in Simplifi, there are what I'm calling master categories, and sub-categories, such as Income, and Income-Social Security, that would be a sub-category to Income.

My issue I many years ago, my wife and I took a 13 week class at a local church, and it was called Financial Peace University (FPU), and it was from Dave Ramsey. We were taught to cutup all our credit cards, and use cash envelopes, and it worked great while we were working, and had paychecks, and were still saving up to retire.

We have been retired many years now, and there are so many places today where you can't use cash, such as Sam's Club and Costco gas stations, because they don't have cash registers at the attendant booths.

We followed the FPU method for many years, and then we discovered YNAB, and back then it was software based, and the data file was stored in dropbox, so both my laptop's YNAB software, and our phones all connected to the same data file, and we never had any data synchronization issues, and we always knew how much we had in each budget category, and sub-category, and YNAB allowed me to set automatic funding dates, as to when to put in an allocated amount of money, into each budget sub-category.

The problem with YNAB is they stopped supporting the one-time purchased software version YNAB4, and forced everyone to switch to a subscription product, which most all companies are doing with their products today, and they decided to totally switch their way of handling your money, and I looked at that new way, and didn't like it, so at that time, I decided to switch to using Quicken Classic.

Like I had already explained, I never tried budgeting in Quicken Classic, I only have been doing transaction tracking, categorizing every transaction we made, but never doing anything with all that data, other than month reconciliation, and keeping track of how much was in or owed in each account.

DryHeat,

What I mean by funding a budget sub-category, is I want us to be able to pullup on our phone, or on my laptop, how much money we have left, or how much we have overspent, in each budget sub-category, and have that automatically refresh at a set interval.

I was able to figure out for example, how to add in my spending plan, under planned spending, how to fund my wife's clothing sub-category, which I called "Clothing, Gloria $175 month". I created this sub-category like this, because when I had a master category called "Clothing", and then a sub-category called "Gloria", I found on the phone apps, the category would only show "Gloria", due to the limited amount of screen available on our phones, so I renamed all my budget sub-categories using commas between the master category name, and the sub-category name.

So this clothing budget for my wife was easy, I turned on rollover, and I've been told that once February ends, and March begins, that another $175 will be added to that category, and any overspending will rollover, along with any unspent money.

This clothing budget example was easy, because it was a monthly amount, but with Christmas and birthdays, they are an annual amount. I tried breaking down Josh's annual birthday budget amount into a monthly amount, such as $8.33/month, but that didn't work out.

I know it sounds crazy to have 100's of gifts that we give each year, but our family is big, and my wife loves shopping and giving gifts, and I need to be able to not only keep track of this gift spending, but to enable a way that she can look at each gift category, and see if she has money available to still spend on that person, and if so, how much is left.

SRC54 · February 25

Thanks for the detailed reply. I am glad you are able to use the Spending Plan with the categories and sub-categories as well as rollover. And thank you too for clarifying that you did indeed mean sub-categories and not sub-accounts. I thought @DryHeat made excellent point about how to use rollover for this kind of thing. I never have used rollover, but I may try it for my Christmas presents this year.

Classic synchronization is so different, as you know, from Simplifi. Everything is kept in the Cloud. Classic has to sync your data from the desktop to the cloud and if you use the app, it downloads from the cloud and then syncs later with the desktop.

Back in the teens when I was using the Windows version, I had a mess because certain accounts wouldn't sync; it was very hit and miss and it would delete things erroneously on the desktop. I switched for a while to another program more like Simplifi. When I went back to Classic, I used the Mac version and I have found the synching to be much smoother though it still works the same way as before. But now, I could if it got messed up in some way, just delete what's in the cloud and re-upload from the desktop. So I find that to be much better though not perfect. It is much easier to fix.

This may not be the problem you were having, of course.

I hope you can get Simplifi to work for you because I do think it is inherently better at synching data between your devices and apps.

DryHeat · February 25

@Robert48314

It sounds like you want to mimic an "envelope method" budget for gifts on a yearly basis. Simplifi does not natively support envelope budgeting (nor any other kind of standard budgeting). It promotes a very different spending management model through its Spending Plan. I personally find that model very effective, and you can find out more about it here: https://support.simplifi.quicken.com/en/articles/4212702-understanding-your-spending-plan

My suggestion about Planned Expense series was based on the idea that you want to see the effect of your gifts on your monthly Spending Plan (albeit in an "averaged" way). It doesn't sound like that is what you really want. If your goal is to have a quick, per-recipient read on how much more you want to give this year, that idea probably won't work for you. (Some might suggest trying to fully fund Savings Goals for each recipient and then draw them down during the year, but I think that would be difficult to use, particularly on the phone.)

In short, if you want envelope-based budgeting, you may need to seek another software solution.

Robert48314 · February 25

I worked most of the day today (yeah, I'm retired, so I have the time) and I feel I have Simplifi working the way I want it to work for our known spendings.

I had to go back today, and rearrange all my sub-categories, back into master categories, because when I started to create my planned spendings, in my spending plan, I was finding that each separate planned spending, sub-categories only show the name of the sub-category, not the master category, along with the sub-category.

For example I now have a category called "Camping:Storage (OCT) $700/year", but when it was a master category named "Camping", with a sub-category named "Storage (OCT) $700/year", when I created that planned spending, it would only show the name "Storage (OCT) $700/year", not "Camping:Storage (OCT) $700/year", which became a real problem with all our gift categories, because for example, our daughter Katelynn has gift categories for anniversary, birthday and Christmas.

So in the above example category "Camping:Storage (OCT) $700/year", that is due in October, and with this being February, I set the target amount this month as $58.33, and then set the rollover amount to $116.67, so that when October rolls around, I will have $700 available to spend!

I did this for every single known expense we will have, including the 100 or so gift categories!

The important caveat for me, was not only knowing how much I will need that particular month, but setting the rollover amount, so when that month's expense comes around, that I'll have enough set aside to pay that amount.

DryHeat · 1:10AM

@Robert48314

The important caveat for me, was not only knowing how much I will need that particular month, but setting the rollover amount, so when that month's expense comes around, that I'll have enough set aside to pay that amount.

As I'm sure you know, the money that is set aside in the rollover amounts is "virtual" — it doesn't represent actual money that has been set aside in an account. But doing it the way you are will ensure that you will have enough actual money (from current income) if two conditions are met:

you had enough unobligated actual money to cover the initial rollover amounts you choose
the amount "Left his month" in the Spending Plan remains positive month by month

I use this system to virtually "put away" funds for non-monthly expenses for an elderly relative and it works well … as long as I keep an eye on that monthly bottom line for her.

In any event, please come back to this thread in a few weeks or months and let us know how your system is working out for you.

How do you fund & manage planned spend categories (edited)

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