Let’s say I do a lot of required traveling, and want to treat my expenditure on petrol over the month as committed. Also I don’t go to the same petrol station each time I fill up.
How am I best managing that? Instinctively I feel like I want to set up a weekly subscription for any merchant in transport where the spend is about the same as my weekly costs. So the committed spending can be adjusted when I fill up.
If I understand correctly subscriptions are only based on transactions though?
I know I could not do committed spending and do a budget instead but I love not having to do the mental juggling to see how much money is mine.
The same principal also applies to my weekly shop where I do an online order from Tesco, Morrisons or Sainsbury’s depending on which delivery slots are available. Be nice to commit to £50 week on groceries, regardless of merchant.
Hope that makes sense, any ideas on the best way to handle these kinds of things?
I think the best way to achieve this is to have a bank account where you just put that money on the side. I don’t see a really viable way of doing it in Emma.
Right now, we know the committed because it’s recurring and we also know when to move it in the budgeting categories (because it hits the bank account).
If you were to add things manually, we wouldn’t be able to move things around; so you might get easily lost?
Hi @pabloblamirez welcome here and you find stacks of help and advice. Yea, Maybe your bank can offer a separate account for expenditure. Then you could set up budgets for each business category
Hans
Hi Hans, thanks! These aren’t business transactions - I have a separate account for my business - but yes a separate account seems to be the way to go. I think I’d have to hide the account (as suggested) otherwise I’m back to the original problem what with all accounts being aggregated.
I want to ring fence the petrol and food money - so that I won’t accidentally spend it - but because it’s not 100% predictable I still want to track my spending against budgets.
I think to get what I’d ideally like I’ll either need to hide my second current account and manage its spend rate and budgets via Yolt (or similar), or open a Monza account for that portion of my overall budget.
If it were possible to have a second Emma account on my phone I would just add one lot of accounts to account 1 and my second current account to account 2 (for food and petrol) that way I could can stay really on top of all my commitments and still be able to see what I have available to spend.
This isn’t a big issue as I’ve identified a couple of workarounds, with everyone’s help
Thanks for all the advice
Yes, that’s essentially what I’ve done. Filter one is my main set of accounts, filter 2 is my second current account. I’ve just had to use a second app to do it (which I’d already rejected for the main job as their recurring transaction detection wasn’t as intelligent and pending transactions were double counted in spending plus commitments).
If I could do this all in Emma then that would be ideal - I understand everything has a cost though, complexity/monetary/opportunity, so I won’t expect it anytime soon, if it does arrive sometime that’ll be great
A filter in Analytics is doable, but again - you can do this pretty easily by using hide/unhide. It’s a bit tedious, but it’s the same thing a filter in analytics would do.
I’ve just realised when you’ve said that that it’s not quite the same thing as what I’m after. Ideally each subset of accounts wouldn’t come with its own spending limit and budgets.
Anyway I don’t want to take any more of your time on this - I just wanted to be sure I wasn’t missing the best way of handling it.
Thanks for all the ideas
