Salary sorter help please!

Help
1

Suppose, my wage arrives on the 1st and is £1k.

I have zero balance before by wage arrives.

I have a Bill pot setup already, which needs £1000.

I want to salary sort my wage into the bill pot.

So on the first my wage comes in, moments later a £200 bill is taken from my main account before I have chance to apply salary sort on it. Now I can only use £800 to apply salary sorting on and so my bill out will not have enough money in it to pay all bills, meaning bills will be paid from my main account.

How am I supposed to do this, aside from not having a zero balance?

2

Ideally you’d want any debits to be days after your wage comes in, so you have opportunity to move it to the bills pot. This is regardless of you using salary sort or not.

If your salary is paid by BACS you could use the “get paid early” to obtain the money the day/s before you’d ordinarily get it, and that might give you the time to do this.

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3

So I get that, and as a work around that might work for some. However, we don’t always get paid by BACS (I pay myself via standing order), and we can’t always change the date people bill us.

Considering the fact that the main account will be used if the bill pot is empty anyway, why impose this limit in the first place? It’s counter intuitive at best, and not fit for purpose at worse?

4

What limit are you referring to? You’ve lost me.

The salary sorter allows your salary to be sorted. Just that. The bills pot allows your bills to be paid from a pot, provided the money is in there. Just that. I don’t understand how that’s counter intuitive and/or not fit for purpose. They are tools that behave the way they are meant to.

Edit: what is it that you want to happen that is not happening now?

5

Sorry if I’m not being clear. Once money has been spent from a wage it can’t be used to add to the bill pot. So the limit I’m referring to is your current balance.

6

“You’ve spent money since this payment arrived, so you can only sort what’s left in your main account balance”.

7

Right, so essentially you want to salary sort AFTER part of the salary has been spent…? That can’t happen, the salary sort is just a glossy front-end to something you can do manually (i.e. move money from the balance to one or more pots), and you can’t move money that doesn’t exist.

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8

But there’s nothing stopping you spending money that’s eventually destined for a bill pot, so why limit what you can assign?

9

You’re not assigning anything, you’re moving it. Once you’ve spent it, it’s not there to move any more.

As @tbutz says, you can’t move money that doesn’t exist.

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10

Surely if a bill came out of your main balance because the pot was empty, you’d need to put less money back into the pot after, as one of the bills had happened already?

Your solution is called an overdraft, by the way. It’s designed to allow elasticity in payments in and out.

11

Oic. I thought it was assignment, not moving it. Thanks for clarifying.

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12

So I usually pay myself a fixed sum at the start of the month via a standing order, then whatever I want / need. Once I set up a salary sort will every credit from my bank end up in the bill pot?

13

Salary Sort is a manual process. So, no.

14

Ok great. Think I was expecting it to be a bit more dynamic than it actually is.

15

I suspect that’s the hope for the evolution of the tool, but we’ll have to wait for that I’m afraid…