Groups UI Request

Feedback & Ideas
1

Hey,

I’ve recently started using Emma with my partner to try and manage our budget. We buy a lot of things together, for which groups could be ideal, but the way they seem to work is frustrating for this use case right now. At least for us, we don’t use budgeting apps everyday, it’s more of a once a week reconciliation activity, which makes the app so hard to use.

When adding from the transaction view, why does the amount and reference get dropped when adding it to a group? I’d love for the amount to default to a percentage or slider of the original value (or at least autofill the original value). Similarly, if the transaction reference could be copied across, it would be a big time save.

Further, there doesn’t seem a way to actually settle up? It shows how much is owed on the app, but doesn’t provide a way to actually pay the person as far as I can tell.

Added to this, the payment method should allow you to add the bills added to the group to your budget areas, so that they also reflect there.

Right now, the guides I can find suggest using the ‘Share Payment’ feature, then sending that request, and then reclassifying the payment when I receive it to the correct (original) category. But, that seems entirely useless too, because the payment request my partner receives doesn’t have any information beyond I request x amount (no transaction reference information appears to be present). That makes it difficult for them to know what they’re paying for, and which budget area to assign it too. Combine that with the payment then comes through with no information on my side too, and budgeting becomes a mess of which payment is which budget on both sides.

This all makes Emma really hard to justify for us currently, as we split almost every expense, and have separate accounts - so any budgeting app we would use would have to be able to accommodate that. Unfortunately, I didn’t realise I’d previously used the trial, so it seems I’ve lost more money trying to save some paying for a years subscription. A real shame this functionality isn’t all that was promised on the marketing materials.

1 Like
2

Hi Liam,

This is a temporary bug, we are fixing in the next app update.

For settling, we have plans to link this to the payment feature so you can initiate one. At this point, creating an income transaction or doing one in Emma Pay and then adding it in the group works.

3

I am a bit confused by this. Budgeting and groups are unreleased features, so it would be quite challenging.

4

What this means is, let’s say I have a group, and put five transactions in there. Two might be bills, another a grocery shop, another a house expense etc

Ideally, my partner would like to create a duplicate of these in their app when they settle up, so they see five payments on their app instead of one, which they can then assign to their budget areas as needed.

They can make a payment on Emma pay, and then split the transaction manually, but it is a very clunky process that way, when it could be quite straightforward.

Then on my side, when they’ve settled up, I should see five payments, split across the budget areas of the original payments I made automatically.

5

Thanks for explaining.

Yes, Budgeting and Groups are separate features at this point.

With this said, the categories are able to offset each other, so if you get a repayment for something like rent, you can just move it to the same category you have used to pay from.

If the settlement payment contains multiple items, you have an option of splitting this into virtual transactions and categorising each one of them.

As you mentioned, you have the option to share each single individual payment too and move it in each category.

The other is probably to keep the groups running without settlement if it’s an ongoing thing (while you settle big payments - rent, bills and so on - and use the categories offsetting). This is more or less the method I have tested for myself.

6

If you want to use groups for every transaction and have accurate budgeting (category per category) on both accounts, this requires a bit of work, but it’s still possible in different ways.

Groups was not built to support the budgeting functionality, but to keep a running balance within a group of people. It’d be quite challenging to persist the groups splits across the app on two accounts.