Whenever I try to manage my budgets from within a personal financial apps like Mint (RIP) or Rocket Money, I am unsure how to account for costs that are not truly my costs. I'm curious to know how others handle situations like this.
Examples:
- company Travel costs: Whenever I am on company travel and need to rent a car, I am required to put the expense on my own card and fill out an expense report to get reimbursed. The problem is the personal financial tools I use pull in the charge as my own and count against my monthly spending plan. So suddenly I have a $1,600 charge against my $150 “Auto and Transport” spending plan. Then when I get paid back, my resources jump up by $1,600.
- Group Dinners: If I put my card down at a group dinner, I could end up with a $300 charge against my “food/dinning” spending plan and multiple small transactions posted to my resources that will be counted as “revenue” by most apps.
I realize that there is an option within Rocket Money (the app I am using now) to hide these transactions from the spending plan/net worth calculations, but that requires me to manually adjust each transaction. Depending on transaction volume, this could be time-consuming and needs to be done regularly to avoid falling behind.
I am wondering if anyone has any better methods for handling these types of situations.
Here’s a few questions:
- How do you manage your budgets and ensure they stay accurate?
- If you ignore transactions in your budgets, how often do you review them, and how much time does it take?
- Is there a better process then the one I am doing?