Struggling with glitches in USAA Money Manager

[ysette9]

I have been using the Money Manager tool built into the USAA website to try to track my expenses over the past couple of years. I like the categories built into the accounts and find it pretty easy to track things that way.

However (there always is a "but", right?)..... I have been frustrated by the glitches in the tool that just do not seem to go away. I have called the tech support folks a couple of times to put in a problem ticket but it never seems to get fixed. The biggest problem seems to be that things simply are not being added up correctly. A few examples:

• I have a category "gifts". Last month I both gave and received gifts, meaning that there were credits and debits to my checking account under this same category. However when I look at the category under the tab for money out, it shows the sum of the numbers, treating all transactions as debits. Put another way, it makes it look like the money I receive as gifts is actually an outflow from my acccount instead of the other way around.
• I have a category "car expenses" and last month we purchase a new-to-us car. When I click on that category to look at the details, the money manager is listing the car puchase twice: once on the day the transaction hit the credit card and a second time the transaction cleared. It is falsely showing that we purchased the car twice over which obviously messes up with the numbers.

For retirement planning purposes I am trying really hard to understand our expenses, so mistakes like this have a big impact on my ability to plan for the future. I would really appreciate it if USAA could fix these glitches once and for all because there is the potential for this to be a really helpful tool.

[Angela Caban USAA]

ysette9,

We appreciate your feedback in the community.

I have sent your comments over to our MyBudget expert for review. Thank you for posting.

[Briana Hartzell USAA]

Here is what our expert had to say about the gifts issues:

Regarding “Gifts” –Although it is a rare scenario to have an expense category end up with more inflows than outflows, we agree that we need to find a better way to depict this scenario. As an alternative, the member could have gone into her checking account and categorized the gifts she received as one of the Income categories found near the bottom of the Category drop down box. For example, she could select Deposits, Expense Reimbursement, Interest, Investment Income or Other Income. The closest match would probably just be Deposits or Other Income. By selecting an Income category for the gifts she received, we would ignore those transactions in her budget.  Only the gifts she purchased would have counted against her budget.

Also, the duplicate transaction issue has been resolved.

Thank you!