Exclude Categories from Spend Analysis

Your tips and ideas
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The spend analysis automatically seems to exclude the “Internal Transfers” category which is a boon. However, I would also think that being able to exclude whole other categories from the spend analysis will help.

For example, I usually pay off my credit card on time and having both spends from my credit cards and the payment to the credit card account being tracked as payments isn’t right as it double counts the expenses. I have created a new custom category for credit card repayments. But I am unable to exclude the entire category from spend analysis. Doing it one transaction at a time is too much manual work.

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This is one we’re definitely going to have a think about @snoop_user

Thanks - really interesting observation!

Cara

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I have all credit card payments tagged as internal transfers to avoid this double-counting, as that’s basically what it is once the credit card transaction has been counted as the spend. Or you could do it the other way - tag the spend transaction as an internal transfer (a credit to yourself as it were) and then have the repayment tagged with the spend category. But that way round, you’d be having to change the category every time depending what it was you’re paying off. Hope that helps!

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@charlwillis That’s pretty straightforward if I think about it :slight_smile:
I feel like an idiot for over complicating this simple thing. Thanks!

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Ha ha, not at all! Always happy to help fellow snoopers :smiley:

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While the suggestion of having things under the internal transfer is one way of solving it, it doesn’t solve the problem of categorising things and getting a better overview of your finances which in turn is the core purpose of categories. I’d like a category which has all my transfers to savings. Now I could do this as an internal transfer however I don’t have a nice way of seeing the monthly amount being saved as there are other items (such as transfers between banks, credit card payments as you mention) in that category. However I don’t want to see it as an expense or “spend”.

I see it as either being able to exclude categories from the spend analysis or sub categorising within a category (which I believe someone else has asked for).

Just my input on the topic

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Makes a lot of sense @wiggydave10

Right now I have a custom category to track my internal transfers to savings, but as you say, this shows as ‘spend’ and would be better to be excluded from the spend view but trackable separately.

We’ll certainly have a think about this.

thanks for your feedback!

Cara

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Perhaps we should rethink what “spend” means. It is probably closer to “sort”. All the “payments” that go into my investments account are counted as custom category of investments. It isn’t money you’ve “spent” but it just means that you’ve sorted it into your investment box.

And as others have said, once you make a credit card repayment (I just tagg that as internal) because you can already see your credit card spending per transaction as opposed to the group of them.

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that’s a nice way of thinking about it @MBA1413 :slight_smile:

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Hello!

Joined the forum for this (related to thread) suggestion.

I share a flat with a friend and manage our joint expenses. In particular, they pay me their share rent on the 1st of every month by standing order, and I pay our combined rent to our landlord on the 15th of the month.

I automatically put both these transactions (one income, one outgoing) into a custom “Rent” category, so that it clearly nets out my rent spend as being my share of the rent. And I like seeing how my spending on groceries, takeaway and bills etc weighs up next to my rent.

The problem is that, given the timings, I spend half the month with “negative spend” because I’m paid by my flatmate on the 1st before that money all goes out, along with my share, on the 15th. This is displayed on the chart as just being 0 until it goes positive.

This makes my month-on-month comparison a bit annoying, because I can’t really see what’s going on in the first half of the month ever.

I see two ways to fix my problem in-app at the moment, but neither is great:

I could exclude both these transactions each month, but that would require me to go back and do then manually and also keep doing it in future. Feels like too much work personally.

I could label them as either “income” or “internal transfers” in order to exclude them each month automatically – but then they are lumped in with other internal transfers and income and that ruins the numbers on those.

The best solution would be if this threads suggestion was reality – if I could simply exclude my custom Rent category from my spend analysis. Then I’d still see it down there for comparison, but my charts would show my non-rent spending over the course of the month.

Of course another suggestion would be to make my housemate send me the rent on the 15th, but that then runs the risk of it arriving late with me and failing to pay our rent on time…

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Hey @Thenleysmith - thanks so much for your feedback!

Excluding categories is certainly on our radar as we can see how and why that would be helpful (such as in your example), but unfortunately it hasn’t made it to the top of our priority list just yet.

Really appreciate you getting in touch though - please keep the ideas coming!

Tom