Tracking your savings

What’s the best way to track savings?

I currently have it as a cost category, so all transfers to and from my ISAs, Savings, etc., accounts are tagged against it. However, ideally, Snoop should recognise it as a “special” type of category and be able to (a) exclude it from monthly spending, and (b) taken into account your net worth.

As a bonus, maybe for your premium/paying customers, track it under various saving pots.

An excellent way of doing this is to have accounts setup up in the app (sort code, Acc number, saving pot name) so Snoop knows when transfers to and from savings occur

Hi @Ricky as part of our Snoop Plus product you can setup any savings accounts as ‘Offline’ accounts. This includes the ability to track a balance (either manually or via automatic regular adjustment rules). These accounts are part of the net worth tracking - and plus customers can filter this net worth to show balances over time on specific accounts.

You can also change any transactions you make from your current account to your savings account to the ‘transfers’ category. Make you select the option to change all transactions for this merchant and it means they will never appear in your spending analysis.

Paul

Hi Paul,
Thank you for coming back to me.
Can you please clarify what do you mean with “ via automatic regular adjustment rules”?

Would it be able to automatically detect my transfers to and from it to update my offline account balance?

Hi @Ricky

Sorry that wasn’t clear - what I mean is that you can setup a rule that says ‘increase my balance by £50 each month on the 1st of the month’ as an example. This type of rule is useful if you know you are moving a set amount into a savings account each month for example.

Another common use case - people setup a mortgage manual account and setup a a ‘reduce the balance by £x on the 25th of each month’ if they know they are paying off a fixed amount of capital each month.

We don’t have the ability yet to detect transfers and adjust that balance.

You could always give this feature a free try. Snoop Plus has a free 7 day trial where you can see if you’d find this useful or not. The other Snoop Plus features are explained here; Snoop Plus | Snoop

Paul

Thank you, Paul.

Please don’t take my candour the wrong way (generally speaking I’m a very happy user), but a rule to automatically increase or decrease a balance and ignores the transfers to and from accounts isn’t beneficial for a budget app that already sees my transactions. Plus, it can easily be replicated by an excel formula.

While I have scheduled payments, there are ad hoc ones (e.g., additional mortgage payments if the end-of-month balance is more than expected), and most importantly all my saving deductions happen in nonregular amounts and schedules (e.g., minor home renovations, travel, etc.)

Probably something for you to consider as part of your roadmap, as I don’t think it would be that complex.

I may consider the plus version due to other features, but not until the integration with Chase is done (not your fault, I know)

Hi @Ricky thanks for the feedback. It’s certainly something to consider for the future.

The tricky thing is spotting the transactions from your current account and knowing they are going into a specific offline account somewhere else. Sometimes they might just say a bank name on, sometimes they might have a sort code/ account number, sometimes they are just free format text. It depends how people are moving money and what payment mechanisms are being used. Direct Debits for example would normally just have a provider name on them.

If you always move money exactly the same way and there is something unique in the description that would equate to specific destination, it might be possible to track this.

However, if I look at my own transactions it certainly wouldn’t work for me. I have two transactions that got out to a savings provider for my two children for example (and the descriptions look exactly the same as they are at the same place). We’d have no obvious way to splitting these into two separate offline accounts.

I also have an external savings account at a different bank for myself - but the descriptions of these transfers change depending on what I remember to put in, or depending on what payment method I use, when I’m not doing adhoc transfers. We don’t get anything behind the scenes to tell us where these transfers actually went so we have to go based on descriptions.

So it’s not a simple one to solve. That’s one reason why we’ve started with basic rules that can be setup to manage the balance on the offline account.

The best outcome would be of course if banks extended out Open Banking into more savings accounts :blush:

Paul

Widder OB support would be good :slight_smile:
It is never straight away unfortunately, but thank you for taking the time to get back to me.
Cheers

Hi @paul_k I find myself missing this feature as well. I need to be able to easily tag transactions as savings and get them excluded from spending report. Essentially I need a category just like “Internal Transfers” but called “Savings”. Extra points if I could get a monthly report on this category, to see how much I’ve saved each month.

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Any thoughts on this?

Hi @snooperman sorry I must have missed your post back in May.

However, since that date we did launch a feature that does exactly what you asked for. You could now setup a customer category (e.g. call it ‘savings’) and you can pick an option to exclude this from your spending analysis so it no longer counts as ‘spending’.

This will appear in your excluded section within the ‘your spending’ analysis screen, so you can still track how much you’ve saved each month.

Paul

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Thank you Paul!