One of my biggest issues with Emma, is how large expenses mess up the monthly budgeting. E.g. Saving up and splurging on a new phone, paying your car insurance annually, etc.
Any large expense can put you into a negative amount for that month’s budget/analytics, when in reality that expense has actually been saved for over several months. It makes it hard to make sense of the rest of your budgetting for the month.
I know I could ‘exclude’ these transactions, but that doesn’t feel the right solution either, as they are expenses. Additionally, if/when Emma release a year view in analytics, I’d like to see these transactions here, as they are part of my spending.
I’m not sure what the ideal solution is, but I know that someone on the community suggested having an option to offset a transaction across the last year (e.g. £1200 purchase, gets split into 12 £100 expenses over last year).
Something like this would be great. What do people think?
I don’t know what the solution is, but I agree a solution to this issue would be welcome
The way I sort of get around it - which is independent of Emma - is to put my large/annual purchases (e.g. annual insurance payment, car service, etc) on a long term 0% credit card to spread the cost of these expenses over several months at 0% rate . I exclude all purchases I make on that credit card from Emma analytics, but don’t exclude the monthly repayments I make to the credit card. However the problem with this is my monthly repayments to the credit card can only be a single category.
How about a toggle in the transaction to ‘exclude from payday/current month’.
Then you could have the transaction properly categorised, it just wouldn’t be counted in the payday ‘amount to spend’, so wouldn’t affect budgeting for that month?
Can you add a flag on a transaction that would mean ‘do not count this transaction towards monthly budget’. So it’ll still be there, but it won’t mess up your ‘left to spend’ amount.
I don’t want to exclude these one-off purchases completely. If for example, you provide a year view for analytics I’d like to see these transactions there.
The issue is primarily that I don’t want to see it affecting my left to spend amount for that month. E.g. this month I bought a new iPhone which I’d been saving for over the last year. With £800 coming out in one month, it meant my left to spend was a minus figure, which makes it hard to budget from
My current solution is that I’ve excluded it, then made a reminder to re-categorise it at the end of the month. Not ideal. I don’t want to exclude it completely, and pretend I’ve not spent the money, but equally I don’t want it to affect my budgeting.
The total budget feature helps with this. In your phone example, you can increase the total budget to £800 over what you originally budgeted so that your remaining to spend figures are not skewed.
Yes, you could do that, but it’s similar to my workaround of excluding them temporarily. If I forgot to change the total budget back before the next month, I might think I’ve got more money available than I actually have in my budget.
A button to “exclude from this months budget” and would be more elegant, and not require me to remember to reset something at the end of the month.
