Ability to apply an income to an expense category to reduce the amount spent that period on that expense.
D
Dragonfly Glades
E.g: you spend $100 on dinner with a friend.
Your friend bank transfers you $50 for their share of the dinner.
Currently in SortMe, you'll have a $100 restaurant expense and a $50 income.
This is incorrect, because you personally only really spent $50 at the restaurant, so your expenses and incomes are now incorrectly inflated.
Instead, we want to allow users to put an income (deposit into their bank accounts) into an expense category to reduce that expense for that period.
Use cases:
- Reimbursement from work (e.g: you spend $100 on petrol, but your work bank transfers that $100).
- Reimbursement from flat mates (e.g: you spend $250 on electricity that month, but your flat mates bank transfer you $125 towards that)
- Reimbursement from health insurance (e.g; you spend $100 at the G.P, but your insurance reimburses you $80 towards that).
In all of these examples, the reimbursement should not be seen as an "income" but rather it should reduce the amount your "spent" on the respective category.
Aidan Scott
I've just updated the title and description for this feature request of how we will likely end up solving this. It's basically allowing an income to be categorised as an expense to reduce the amount "spent" on that category for that period.
This also has the benefit of now overstating your income for that period, as someone paying you towards an expense you incurred, isn't really an income, it's just meant to reduce the amount you spent on that category.
Aidan Scott
This a great idea Dragonfly Glades, currently it's quite messy in SortMe when you pay rent/utilities but then you get partially reimbursed later.
e.g: If you pay $1,000 per week in rent (as the head tenant) then your housemates pay you $750 for their share, when it comes to budgeting and categorisation, you should only have $250/week under your "rent" expenses not $1,000.
(same for utilities, etc).
I'll discuss this at our next product meeting on Tuesday.
D
Dragonfly Glades
Hi Aidan, we run a completely independent account for house expenses so all housemate contributions are categorised as Income (including 'head tenant'), and all outgoings as Expenses. Personal accounts are kept separately.