Add Negative Expense Feature for Reimbursement Tracking
Issue:
I frequently pay shared expenses with others and record the full amount as an expense, and the only workaround for me was to record their reimbursements as income, but this inflates the expense analysis in Budget Flow. For example, I pay $10 for burgers ($6 for me, $4 for my brother). When reimbursed $4 and recorded as income, my net balance is correct ($6), but the expense report shows $10, misrepresenting my personal spending.
Another workaround is recording the expense as pending, then reduce the amount on the expense transaction and remove it from pending (for example my recorded expense of $10 is reduced by $4 after reimbursed, so the total recorded expense becomes $6). Unfortunately this issue becomes more difficult with multiple digit amounts, multiple people, multiple times of transactions, or delayed reimbursements across transactions. For example paying the dinner first for multiple times but same friends, when they pay back I'd have to go back to each transaction and recalculate.
Proposed Solution:
Add a negative expense feature (for reimbursements or refunds) to record reimbursements (e.g. from the example, -$4 in “Food” for brother’s share).
Accurate net expense in reports (e.g., $10 - $4 = $6), reflecting true personal spending.
Preserves original transaction details without manually re-editing them again.
Example Case:
This makes it easier in the future when let's say, paying the dinner first for 3 friends, I can input the expense I paid in total, and then input a pending negative expense of each of my friend's expense. Once they paid, transaction is no longer pending, and only reduces my total expenses, and only affects the ‘expense’ category instead of income.
I’m open to other feedback or methods!
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Comments5
so sharlin
Sep 9, 2025
Totally agree with this request! This is really my daily pain point and what I need after using this app for a while🥲
I shared bill and pay on behalf my lunch mates almost everyday, the misrepresentation of my income (+20% come from positive transaction of F&B category due to reimbursement from my friends) and higher than usual F&B expenses analysis makes me struggling from getting my actual expenses on my food expenses.
The only way I view the correct nett expenses for each category now is grouping transaction list by category, and scroll all the way down to the end of the section just to see the amount.
I believe this is not something challenging from technical pov, and it would be really useful to solve our daily problems.
Meanwhile, if there is an overview analysis for EACH category’s nett amount (balance both income and expenses per category) can actually be an interim solution too.
CHIH-YEN WU
Aug 27, 2025
In this example (my recorded expense of $10 is reduced by $4 after reimbursed, so the total recorded expense becomes $6), my solution is that I record my expense of $6 and record another expense of $4, but select an unevaluated transaction. Once my friend pays me back $4, I will delete that expense. It helps me know how much I paid exactly ($6)
But please fix the problem that all unevaluated transactions are not summed up.
In this example means that there is no total of the unevaluated amount I paid for my friend.