As a hobby, I play fantasy sports, bet on sports, and participate in sports pools. As a result, I have a group of transactions that are both positive and negative. Some months may be negative, some months may be positive.
On the Spending Trends tab for the last 30 days, I am seeing that the net amount for that category is being flipped to negative, even though I made money over that period.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to track a group of transactions whose directional impact may change in any given period?
It depends on philosophically how you want to look at it. If you set it as income, a positive number is cash in and a negative number is cash out. If you set it as expense, a positive number is cash out, negative is cash in.
Personally, I would set the sports betting category as an expense as my reasonable expectation is that I would not be making positive cash flow on that category over the long term.
Or put differently, in gambling, you gotta spend money to make money (or so they tell me). So, the expense precedes any success in winning any of that money back. So, I too, would call it an expense and hope to be pleasantly surprised.
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You could create “Fantasy Sports Income” and “Fantasy Sports Expense” as two different Categories, and then create an AutoCat rule to categorize positive ones into the Income category and negative ones into the Expense category. Likely your expense category will be consistent, but the income will be sporadic.
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