Need a way to mark items as Work Expense Reimbursement

[ryangradke@gmail.com]

I have many items that I pay for with a personal debit/credit card that really do not affect my spending. I will show an income item later for them, but it would be nice to identify both the expense and income item as something I expect to be reimbursed for.

When I review my spending I want mostly want to know what am I spending for my personal use.

[Damon]

Thanks for the suggestion.

Note: You might want to create labels and/or notes to mark these items for now.

[mlebarron]

Or you can Mint just ignore the transactions for now so it doesn't affect anything ("Exclude From Mint" under Categories)

[werddrew]

I'll bump this one...

Here's a question... For most of these "please add this category" posts, the default answer seems to be "use labels instead."

Is there some sort of resistance to adding some of these commonly requested categories? It seems somewhat silly to me that there's a line item for Pet Grooming but not one for Public Transportation. And an item for Sales Tax but not one for Bars/Nightlife. Advertising but no Business Reimbursements...

Is it a TECHNICAL reason why those aren't added, or is there some sort of policy that you guys want to stick with the current categories for a while?

[Damon]

"Is it a TECHNICAL reason why those aren't added, or is there some sort of policy that you guys want to stick with the current categories for a while?"

More of a UI/UE issue, actually. We don't want to have 500 categories on the categorization page.

[mintuser1]

I get perdiems as well as reimbursement for business expenses.. it would be nice to be able to know if i am living within my perdiems or not.. I second the business expense category. Will there ever be custom fields other than labels.. no chance I will use the pet labels any time soon.. would rather have at least a few options of my choosing.

[MintProduct]

Thanks for the discussion on categories. While it seems like a fairly straight forward add categories, or better yet make them customizable, there are other aspects of the site that expect a known, common category structure. That said, we are looking into some solutions that will be more flexible. Stay posted for news on these.

In the short term we will work to address the most popular request that we am seeing which is reimbursable business expense.

[daveman692]

In the short term we will work to address the most popular request that we am seeing which is reimbursable business expense.

Yes, this would be really useful. I've tried using labels though that isn't so useful throughout the rest of the application (such as excluding from trends).

[evbart]

I agree, i'm not quite sure how to make Mint handle my business expenses plus the business expense reimbursement checks that are included in my paychecks.

I also find some of the category choices irrelevant to my lifestyle, so it seems weird that we can't choose our own.

I know other parts of the system require static tags, but thats the value that site like mint should be bringing. Wesabe offers fully customizable tags (which is way to much work and organization) you offer fully static ones, and clearly the answer is somewhere in between.

[evbart]

Did you ever out how to find out to do this?:

"I have many items that I pay for with a personal debit/credit card that really do not affect my spending. I will show an income item later for them, but it would be nice to identify both the expense and income item as something I expect to be reimbursed for."

[davids]

I also need a way to deal with reimbursable business expenses. These items are charged to my personal credit card and reimbursement is received as part of my paycheck.

I need to remove these from my normal stream of earning/spending so that I have an accurate picture of my actual income and expense.

I also need to make sure that I've been reimbursed for all expenses I've marked as reimbursable. (Balance/reconcile the two amounts.)

Because of that additional requirement I'm guessing that there is a better "UI/UE" solution than just making another category, but please come up with something soon!

[bkparikh]

I have a considerable number of business expenses. While I do have a label attached to these expenses, the label doesn't help for spending analysis and reporting on personal expenses. Can I exclude from spending trends based on a label? If so, I believe this would solve my problem.

While a "Business Expense" category may help, if I spend $500 on hotels, I would like to track that as both Hotel and Business Expense.

Excluding from Mint is less than ideal because I want one place to track all expenses. I just want to be able to separate business and personal expenses.

I am currently using both Mint and Yodlee (I gave up on Wesabe). I have found that in Yodlee I can flag expenses as "business" (in addition to categorizing them) and exclude these flagged expenses from my spending analysis and reporting. I've set it up so that all transactions that come from my corporate credit card are pre-flagged as business. For the few that aren't business I can uncheck the flag.

Also as others have mentioned, I would like to reconcile business expenses with what I am reimbursed. I haven't found this feature through any application just yet, but I may have not looked hard enough.

I really like the UI experience with Mint and will keep my account active in hopes that the functionality is implemented soon.

[mintfeedback]

I agree with the other posters here - it's important to have a category called "business expenses" and another called "reimbursement for business expenses". If I spend $500 on tools for work, and will be reimbursed, then that expense really shouldn't show up in my spending / budgeting graphs.

As far as using the "Exclude from Mint" category goes, that doesn't really make sense in context. It's not that I don't want to manage that money, it's that it falls under a different CATEGORY.

[kmueller]

I would also like to request a Business Expense category!

(Just putting my 2 cents in)

[icit]

me too. although i don't like asking every time i need a new category. i wish this was completely tag-based and reports and such ran off of tags. feels weird to have both tags and labels.

[ellaris]

I get that there shouldn't be 500 categories, and there easily could be.

I agree that reimbursable work expenses would be very helpful to me, and I'm glad you're going to work on adding that one. Bonus points if there's some way to indicate when a PARTICULAR expense has been reimbursed (matching income with expense or just checking it off so I can stop wondering if that check ever came).

On the issue of customized categories, what if there were just a few more possible categories (say, three) and then we could choose which three from a dropdown, so we couldn't go off in all directions. You could take suggestions for additions to the dropdowns and if a whole lot of people used one category you could consider moving it from the custom section to the standard list.

Or something.

Thanks, whatever you do! I just cancelled with mvelopes in favor of mint, which is faster and easier and free. Still hoping for a few more features, though. :)

[synrg]

THE CATEGORY SUGGESTION GOES DOUBLE FOR ME! As a public tranportation user in San Francisco, I can't categorize my various monthly passes and train tickets -- and yet there is an entire unmovable budget category for "spending at the pump." Indeed there are many very useful categories that are left out. It is as if the site were designed for suburban yuppies with high "pet grooming" expenses, who never venture into a real city. If you could put "public transportation" into the gasoline category it would help the rest of us use that budget category. In travel there are plane tickets but no train tickets, but even so, the categorization suggests vacation rather than cold, hard work. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the taste of mint, and looking forward to its becoming more applicable to my urban life.

I'll bump this one...

Here's a question... For most of these "please add this category" posts, the default answer seems to be "use labels instead."

Is there some sort of resistance to adding some of these commonly requested categories? It seems somewhat silly to me that there's a line item for Pet Grooming but not one for Public Transportation. And an item for Sales Tax but not one for Bars/Nightlife. Advertising but no Business Reimbursements...

Is it a TECHNICAL reason why those aren't added, or is there some sort of policy that you guys want to stick with the current categories for a while?

[fxtrotlima]

I also agree about adding the "to be reimbursed" category and then the specific reimbursement. Also, maybe the category/user interface problem could be solved by keeping a limited number of larger categories constant, but then allowing user-defined break-downs within those bigger categories. Maybe some features, like comparisons to others' spending, could only be available for the larger categories. I am also not sure how to categorize, say, a fee I pay to be a member of a professional society, or some travel to a conference that I might cover myself. It is a work expense that will not be reimbursed. Work-related expenses do seem to need more categories.