Ability to apply an income to an expense category to reduce the amount spent that period on that expense. | Voters

Ability to apply an income to an expense category to reduce the amount spent that period on that expense.

in progress

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.

March 27, 2024

Aidan Scott

Update: this has been delayed by some other higher priority tickets. We expect this to be live by end of January now. I can't imagine this deadline would get pushed back any further.

Aidan Scott

marked this post as

in progress

This has now started and is in progress. No firm ETA yet but should be before end of this year.

Aidan Scott

Merged in a post:

Shared expenses adjustment

Tim Townsend

I have noticed that if I purchase something for myself and another person that expense is classified as all my expense despite them reimbursing me for their half of the payment. 
This leads to an incorrect expenses category. I can reclassify their reimbursement in income to a loan repayment or similar category, but I have no way of removing half of that initial transaction from my overall expenses category which overinflates my actual expenses. 
Would like to see a workaround to be able to cancel out either full or part payments made and reimbursed on behalf of someone else from income and expenses.

July 29, 2024

Aidan Scott

Thanks Tim, this is a great point. We're designing some concepts for this as we speak.

We're thinking of letting you assign an income transaction to an expense category to effectively reduce the amount "spent" in that category.

e.g:

You spend $100 on dinner for you and a friend
Your friend pays you back $50
You can classify this $50 income as reimbursement for "Restaurant", thus bringing your "Restaurant" spend for that period down to the $50 it should be.

I'm going to merge this into a similar existing post

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.

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.

Monique Richards

Aidan Scott hi, would love this prioritized if at all possible?

Aidan Scott

Monique Richards: Agreed! I'll bring it up at our next roadmap planning meeting (23rd July).

I'm thinking when you go to recategorise an income transaction, there's an option called "Reimbursement / refund" once you click that, you can then select which expense category this income applies to.