Splitting bills w/ Roommates

[chinolam]

This a feature I'd like to see in Mint...
Say I pay all the household bills (rent, cable, utilities), I'd like to have Mint let me say I actually pay 33% on reocurring payments. I have my roommates pay me at the end of the month their cut and this isn't accounted for. As of now, Mint tells me that I've spend a lot more than I earn and I think it's mostly due to this problem.

And it'd be nice to have a way to account for all this if it was my roommates. Essentially their Mint would tell them that they pay nothing for home, bills & utilities.

Or is there a way to do this now that I'm not aware of?
Thanks!

[mhust6]

Not a perfect solution, but you can manually split each transaction, and categorize the part of the bills that your roommates pay as "Exclude from Mint".

[sam43209]

I currently split my transactions to account for my roommate and set their portions to "exclude from mint", It's tedious and I hate having to do it but I can't find another way right now. Also, since it becomes excluded, I have no good way of tracking things if it goes awry, therefore I have to keep an excel sheet as well just to track the other portions.

Admins... Please give us a solution!!! It doesn't have to be perfect but I will settle for better than this whole manual junk that eliminates my ability to track it.

[danep]

I just budget for the full amount of the utilities and then consider the repayment to be additional income. Is there a reason this won't work? If you think about it, it's the most "correct" way to do it, as it represents your actual cash flow.

[EarlyAdopter64]

A more accurate way to handle these is to consider your relationship with each roommate as an "account." If you pay $660 in rent to your landlord and collect a check for $220 from each roommate, you'd categorize it like this:

$660 to landlord SPLIT as $220 for rent, $440 for transfer
$440 deposited in checking as transfer

Effectively your $440 is moved out of checking as a liability and "into" your "accounts" with your roommates as an asset (accounts receivable), then transferred back into checking when they pay up.

Later you can filter your transactions lists to view only the transfer category and make sure the transfers come to zero. Same thing works with splitting a restaurant check, borrowing or lending money, etc. It's better to think of these as transfers than as actual income or expenses.

[danep]

A more accurate way to handle these is to consider your relationship with each roommate as an "account." If you pay $660 in rent to your landlord and collect a check for $220 from each roommate, you'd categorize it like this...


Very interesting, that makes a lot of sense - thanks for the tip!!