Ask your beginners questions here šŸš€

Hey! :wave:

You just need to click on Net Worth on the feed tab, and then press and hold your balance at the top of the screen! Youā€™ll know itā€™s calculating because it says ā€œpredicting your futureā€ :blush:

Got it! Thank you!!

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Iā€™m currently a Pro member on iOS but am now changing to an android phone. Is there any way of transferring my subscription or will I need to cancel on iOS and sign up again on android? Iā€™ll be using the same email and phone number.

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Just login with the same account and you should see all the Pro features.

When iOS expires, you can resubscribe on Android.

Hi there,

Really love Emma!! Iā€™ve been looking for a while for a decent personal finance app and I think Iā€™ve finally found the one.

What Iā€™m still trying to figure out is how to best separate my personal from my family spending. I have two current accounts that I use for day-to-day spending, one my personal into which my monthly salary gets paid and one joint account with my wife which we both fund with a monthly instalment. It would be great if I could have two budgets, one for my personal spend and one for my family spend.

Keep up the great work!

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Hey @Luricher

Welcome to the Emma Community :blush:

We are working on a new feature called Spaces that should help with this! You can find out more about spaces by clicking into the thread below :point_down:

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I could use some help understanding something with saving and excluding the transactions.

I move a certain amount of money to multiple saving accounts every week. To me, it seems easier to create my overall budget based off of the expected minimum income and then create a budget for how much I want to save each month so that way itā€™s part of the total budget and it feels like Iā€™m actively working towards something.

However, I was reading that transactions that are moved between accounts should be excluded to keep it from double counting (I think?) in the analysis.

The only way that makes sense is to not set any sort of savings budget and exclude all transactions going to a savings account. Is that the right way to do it?

For some reason it doesnā€™t feel like Iā€™m working towards anything doing it that way though. So Iā€™m curious if there is a way to include savings into a budget that wonā€™t double count. If I could understand the analytics a little better I might be able to get used to it (Iā€™m a beginner at budgeting). Is there something somewhere that explains that in a little more detail?

Also, what other types of transactions should be excluded? How do people handle random large transactions? Are these excluded too? I saw something about excluding credit card payments, but I didnā€™t understand why that is. Is that only if the credit card is tied to Emma? I do not have mine linked so Iā€™m not sure that makes sense to exclude my payments on it. Right now I account for it as a bill.

I think thereā€™s flexibility to do what makes most sense to you.

If Iā€™m moving a portion of my monthly income to a savings or investment account I categorise the outgoing transaction from my current account as an investment so that it shows up in analytics. If the savings/investment account is connected to Emma I exclude the incoming transaction in the savings/investment account so it doesnā€™t get counted as additional income. This I think matches what you want to do.

If Iā€™m just shuffling money between accounts in a way that isnā€™t associated with new income in that month I exclude transactions on both the outgoing and incoming sides.

If a random large spend from my current account is being replenished by savings I exclude it because I included it as a spend when I was accumulating the savings account. But you could also categorise as a spend and treat the money coming from the savings account as income for that month.

With credit cards - if the credit card isnā€™t connected to Emma I categorise the credit card bill payment from my current account so that it shows up in analytics.

When the credit card is connected to Emma is when I have most difficulty deciding what approach to take. At the moment I use the recommended approach of categorising the credit card transactions and excluding the credit card bill payment. This avoids counting spending twice. But itā€™s not entirely satisfactory as the bill payment is really the thing thatā€™s important in relation to my monthly income so ideally would want that in analytics. The alternative approach would be to exclude all the credit card transactions and categorise the bill payment, but then you lose granular knowledge of how youā€™ve spent your money. I canā€™t help but wonder that there is perhaps an as yet unconceived better approach to accommodating credit cards in aggregators such as Emma.

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Thank you! I was miss understanding what was meant by excluding internal transactions. I thought it was meant to exclude both the withdrawal AND the deposit into the savings account so I couldnā€™t wrap my head around it. But just excluding the deposit into savings makes perfect sense and is what Iā€™m looking for.

Do you have any examples of what other transactions youā€™d exclude when moving them internally? I only have two checking accounts and two savings accounts tied to Emma so this might be why Iā€™m struggling to grasp this part. Excluding might be something for people who have the investment accounts (Iā€™m not sure what else there even is to tie to Emma) so I think I just canā€™t imagine a scenario (outside of the savings account issue from above) that Iā€™d need to do it.

I agree about the credit card. It seems to be missing something. But treating it like a bill will be the best for me for now.

Thank you for your help!

I think your understanding matches the default behaviour - excluding internal transfers does by default exclude both sides of the transfer. But we (users) have the flexibility to treat both sides independently so can essentially do what makes sense to us.

I think transfers to/from savings accounts and payments of credit card bills are the only scenarios where I have to think whether it makes more sense to me to give a transaction a category rather than use the default behaviour of excluding the transaction from analytics.

Maybe the only other thing to mention is sometimes I have multiple transactions in a chain and I need to decide which point in the chain to categorise rather than exclude. For example, to get my money into a particular savings account I need to first move it to a checking account at a second bank. What I do is this:

Bank A Checking account
My salary goes into this bank is is categorised as income
Outgoing transfer to bank B checking account excluded (default behaviour)

Bank B Checking account
Incoming transfer from bank A checking account excluded (default behaviour)
Outgoing transfer to bank B savings account categorised as Investment (change from default behaviour)

Bank B Savings account
Incoming transfer from bank B checking account excluded (default behaviour)

But I could have categorised the outgoing transfer from bank A checking account as investment rather than the outgoing transfer from bank B checking account. The effect on analytics would have been the same.

Hi, I have a question, can I edit the settings to only allow my partner to see my bank balance and not every transaction on the Emma app on her phone?

I used to use honeydue which had this feature, but this app is only available in the US now.

Hey @23bluebell :wave:

Welcome to the Emma Community!

We donā€™t currently have this feature - but I can let the team know that youā€™ve mentioned it.

How does this work on honeydue? Does your partner login to your account, or are accounts linked etc?

Hi,
The honeydue app is downloaded on both phones, but as account holder I can choose within the app to allow just balances or all transactions to show on my partners app.

Kind Regards
Michael Hanks

Thatā€™s cool!

Weā€™re building something called Spaces thatā€™ll let you share accounts with another user, but I donā€™t think weā€™ve planned on building anything that lets you pick and choose which information they can see.

Could be a nice addition for us though :raised_hands:

Iā€™ve just purchased EmmaPro and thereā€™s was no option to go with the pay monthly scheme just the annual payment. I got it on the discount that was available over the last couple of days.

Also, will I be able to download and use it on a second phone as I currently use two and would like it on my Android as well as the iPhone that I am using now.

Thankyou

Hey,

Iā€™ve tried to link up my Halifax Help To Buy ISA but Halifax say that the data from the account is not shareable.

So, Iā€™ve added the figure as a manual account.

However, I will need to update this figure manually every month with the amount I direct debit into it.

Is there a less labour intensive way of tracking this asset?

Thanks,
Angus

Smart Rules is a nice way to do this: https://help.emma-app.com/en/article/smart-rules-1f03j3/

Iā€™ve just downloaded the app and Iā€™m starting to play with it so I might find out some of this stuff by trial and error but I see a lot of people giving helpful answers here so thought I would ask. If nothing else it might help me think these things through!

  • I have a current (checking) account, a couple of credit cards, a Paypal account and a Monzo card

  • My plan is to include all transactions that is money ā€œleavingā€ me, so payments for good/services/whatever, as included for analytics. Also to exclude the transfer of money between them e.g. paying off the credit card. I think this will avoid double counting, right? The only exception to this might be payments to Monzo that are going into Pots for various sinking funds. I discovered the Pots appear in the savings section, so I should probably classify those as savings transactions

  • I have a savings account with Marcus which I think I can add manually as an account, but will have to update manually

  • If my mortgage is with one of the providers listed as available can I also link that in? I suppose the only way it to try itā€¦

  • I have a Vanguard account but I donā€™t think that has integration currently even though itā€™s in the list to make you tweet them requesting it

Right, now Iā€™ll just do some playing and see how much I can work out! If anyone can confirm my thinking or give any feedback on this I would appreciate it.

Ideally, anything that is not money spent we put it in excluded (transfers between accounts).

Mortgages are not supported by Open Banking unfortunately, and yes you are right on Vanguard and Marcus. :slight_smile: