Allocating one transaction to multiple debts

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Honestly, I’m loving this tool so far and I’ve full sent myself into the subscription based on concept alone. I love not having to input the transactions myself every week because it saves so much time in a very busy household. My boyfriend and I needed a quick solution to some bad spending habits and this shows so much promise for us. I’ve hit a couple of snags, but I’m hoping these are just beginner bumps in the road since I’ve managed to work with customer service and Google to figure everything out so far. Here’s the latest one that I don’t think is worth bothering customer service with just yet and that Google hasn’t really offered up anything that I can find:

I have multiple student loans that I’m working to pay off. In order to track my progress on these individually, and since each one has its own interest rate, I’ve separated these into different debt accounts within Goodbudget. However, I pay all of these loans in one lump sum every month to the same loan servicer which automatically allocates my payment. Now, I can adjust the amounts monthly that are going to each loan manually if they change, that’s slightly inconvenient, but not a big deal. The real problem is how to allocate the transaction once it is imported from my bank to all of my debt accounts. From what I can tell, there is an option to split transactions into multiple envelopes, but there’s no option for that on the debt transaction tab.

I tried messing with creating an envelope that the debt accounts are individually assigned to, but the system yells at me (turns red and won’t let me hit submit) for trying to assign my debt accounts regular envelopes. It also messed with everything for some reason i.e. took my accounts out of order, renamed one, etc. So, I reset everything back, but I’ve got my one debt transaction sitting there not assigned to anything at the moment, because I want to make sure that I can track debt progress. Anyone know if I’m missing something or if there’s a solution for this?

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There’s always multiple ways to accomplish things with Goodbudget. Personally, I try to mimic in Goodbudget what happens in real life, so this is what I’d do.

  1. Create a bank account called Loan Servicer, create separate debt accounts that the Loan Servicer will be paying.
  2. I don’t know how you actually pay your loan servicer, but let’s say you pay them online by a transfer from your checking account to the servicer. In Goodbudget this would be recorded as a transfer transaction from checking to Loan Servicer.
  3. Now you have a positive amount in the Loan Servicer account. Then from the Loan Servicer account you’d do three separate transfers, one to each of your debt accounts.

I hope that helps.

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I have to thank you so much! This worked out for me. It’s a little more manual effort per month, but nothing too horrible. The automatically imported transactions do allow me to switch them to transfers that then go into a separate “account” labeled Loan Servicer in Goodbudget. After that, I just do a few quick debt transfers in the amounts that were for each and it 0s out the account. Honestly, wouldn’t have come up with that and it serves the purpose I need it to! I appreciate your response.

I will also say, and I don’t know if this would need to be a separate post, but being able to split debt payments into multiple loan accounts would be a nice time saving addition to features for those of us with student loans.

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I’m glad it helped. I know there’s extra steps, but that’s what happens in real life with these transactions, so we’re just doing the same thing in GB😊

Personally I don’t use the debt account unless it’s a very simple straightforward debt. I’ve found the debt account usage is just too limiting.