Tracking Reimbursable Expenses using Mint.com

[Stephen]

Do you manage reimbursable expenses using Mint.com? If so, we invite you to start customizing your Mint experience today. And as you discover what works best for you we encourage you to share your creative ideas with other Mint users who may have similar money management interests and approaches. Please post on this thread all things related to creative use of custom categories and tags with tracking reimbursable expenses with Mint!

[JohanMinty]

Actually I will use multiple tags on one transaction where applicable. I've only updated stuff starting October 1 going forward. Not sure if I need to go back any further since it met my needs up to this point.

[danep]

Under the transfer category, I have created a category for each person or business with whom I share expenses. When a transaction comes in, I split it between the appropriate categories. Example: if my spouse and I go grocery shopping and I pay for it with my credit card, then when that transaction shows up I will split it as 50% "Groceries" and 50% "Transfer->[name]". To find out how much anyone owes me, all I have to do is search for transactions in their category.

This gets more complicated when they are doing the same thing - i.e. you each pay for entire purchases alternately. You end up having to do some creative positive/negative splits when you get reimbursed (which thankfully works now!), but it all works out. If you are interested in more details let me know and I can provide an in-depth example.

[hcg]

I used a "reimbursed by work" tag. I think I'll go back and exclude them from Mint.

[utz]

In MS Money I created an account to hold the reimbursible expenses. Funds that I put up were transferred into that account. When the reimbursement occurred I transferred them back to whichever of my accounts received them. Example: I transfer $100 from cash to "Business Expense" when I lay out for a reimbursible expense. When I get the reimbursement check and deposit it into my checking account that is captured as a transfer from "Business Expense" to "checking". Ultimately, it becomes a 2-step movement of money from cash to checking with a net effect of zero on my assets. Lotta work, but a good way to make sure nothing falls thru a crack. Not sure how to handle it in Mint. End result should be that an outlay is offset by a reimbursement and it will appear as though I spent nothing.

[walkerrunner]

I'm also trying to figure out what to do with reimbursable transactions since I do have a lot of work lunches that fall under this category. I would like to track them within Mint but on a separate graft or chart if possible. Any suggestions?

[danep]

Someone PMed me asking for a more detailed explanation of how I handle shared/reimbursable expenses, so here it is. First of all, I should give credit where credit's due - here is where I learned about the system that I currently use. Note that the example discussed here is that of splitting rent with roommates.
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.
With the addition of custom categories, each roommate can have their own category under transfer, so you can see what any roommate owes you at any given time. There is one problem with this method which can lead to many sorts of complications.

The problem is essentially that, while you are keeping track of what your roommates owe you, your roommates (if they are using Mint) have no way of also keeping track of what they owe you (or conversely, you have no way of keeping track of how much you owe your roommates). Let's take an example: you and your roommates go out to dinner frequently and alternate paying for dinner (so perhaps you pay for everyone's dinner one night, and someone else pays the next). In this case, during the month, neither you nor your roommates have a clear picture of exactly how much money they owe the other or how much they are "spending" (effectively you are all buying dinner on credit from each other), and thus none of you can effectively budget expenses during the month. This is illustrated nicely by explaining how you settle up accounts.

Settling up at the end of the month is tricky but doable. Let's say a roommate owes you $220 for rent. However, you split a $20 pizza one night, and he paid for it. Thus, he really only owes you $210 dollars, so he will cut you a check for $210. You then categorize this into his transfer category on Mint. However, note that at this point there is still a $10 balance on his transfer category, and you have not incorporated your share of the pizza into your budget. To reconcile this, you must split that $210 check as +$220 Transfer->Roommate and -$10 Food and Groceries, or whatever category you prefer for the pizza. So technically budgeting does still work with this system, but it doesn't work well, because you don't really know what you've spent until the end of the month (or whenever you settle accounts.)

[mburdsall]

For business reimburseable travel i do the following> I created a catagory called travel reimbursed and I have also created a tag called reimbused expeneses. Whe I have an expense due to business travel I assign the travel reimbursed catagory and I assign the tag called reimbused expeneses. This way when I go into trends I can make sure that the expenses do not appear and impact by normal expenses. Since the first graph allows me to exclude tags I can keep the busienss expenses out. The second graph does not allow me to exclude tags and the budget does not allow me to exclude tags, therefore by having them go to the special catgory they are not included.

[gamecockgrad]

My roommates and I have a great excel based system that we use.

Actually, one of my roommates just turned our method in an iphone app that you should review. It's called splitcosts and is designed to help roommates, co-workers, etc. split costs and keep track of their group's finances and reimbursements.

You can read the initial description and download the app at: splitcosts.blogspot.com

- Adam

[mburdsall]

For those of us that have regular travel expenses it would be nice if Mint increased the functionality and reporting in this area. It would be nice tohave a master expense and income category for reimbursed travel expenses. And reporting that allowed you to track reimbursement status. Today nothing exists.

[harmonist34]

I'm struggling with this. I don't really want to link my corporate credit card because I don't use it for personal expenses and I don't want there to be any chance that those expenses affect my personal budgeting, etc.

But I have to account for larger-than-normal paychecks when I have reimbursements, so I'm not sure what to do.

[mburdsall]

If you do not want to link your corporate credit card to Mint you can take the portion of your paycheck and spilt out the reimbursement porition and categorize as "Exclude from Mint". This way it will not appear in any of the reports or graphs.

[theChakra]

For most traveling consultant, here is the scenario -

You have one or more credit card you use for business travel. You want to be able to Categorize or Tag all of those transactions as "Business Expense" and exclude from personal reporting. From paycheck side, you should be able to set a rule saying "$x" from the paycheck is always my pay and $(total-x) is reimbursement. The "Business Expense" should then tie to "reimbursement".

If you want to push it, you should be able to Categorize or tag the expense as Business 1, Business 2 etc. for multiple businesses and tag the reimbursements as such.

What I am planning to do now? I am planning to create multiple account to track by personal, my expense with my employer and my home business. I would really like to not to have to do that. Is that even correct English :)

[mburdsall]

As a person who does a lot of travel and has many reimbursement expenses and checks, I would like to have the following abilities.

1. to tag reimbursement/business expenses and income and have those expenses/income excluded from Mint reporting unless I choose to have it included. Therefore using something like the tag options on ALL reports and graphs.
2. to identify reimbursement trips and group expenses on reimbursement trips. for example create a trip ticket r-trip-1 and assign all expenses and income to that trip ticket. Having the ability to see the trip tickets and to be able to make sure that the income and expense portion balance.
3. assign income to a trip ticket or match the income reimbursement to the business expenses.
4. provide reporting to support this feature.

[mburdsall]

Can you please delete and remove account!