How do people track and categorize contributions to—and reimbursements from—HSAs & FSAs?

Ask Anything
,
1

I’m flummoxed over how to parse, track, and categorize reimbursements in general. How do people do it? And specifically, how do you do it from FSA/HSA accounts? Do you link the accounts, and then somehow pair the reimburseables/reimbursements together?

2

The way I do it is have a separate category for HSA Medical Spend. If I use my own credit card, then I use Medical, if I use the HSA card, I use HSA Medical Spend. If I reimburse myself from the HSA, then I mark it as HSA Medical Reimbursement, and create it as a transfer type, so it wouldn’t show on reports and it should balance out when I deposit that into my bank, and I’d then use HSA Medical Reimbursement as the category for that deposit.
Because I don’t always request reimbursement from the HSA since I am also using it as a retirement account, I don’t do the transfer mechanism.

3

Hi @lilybinns …are you able to connect your FSA/HSA account so your transactions flow into Tiller or are you manually tracking its balance?

4

Thanks @Brad.warren – for some reason I haven’t been able to connect the FSA account, so I’m currently trying to figure out how to manually book the income and reimbursements and tie them to their respective expenses.

5

Thanks for sharing that approach, that’s helpful.

6

Got it, @lilybinns …my approach is similar to @yossiea. If I use our cash for a med expense, the transaction goes into the Medical category. We have a flexible spending account (FSA), so I am manually tracking that account’s balance for reference in our balance sheet as a diminishing asset, but if I use the FSA card for transactions, I don’t track these in Tiller. (Doing so would double count these reductions in our annual cash flow: first as a deduction from salary for the FSA account, AND THEN AGAIN as a medical expenses transaction.)

So our budget for anticipated, annual medical expenses is actually the sum of our FSA annual allotment, plus the medical category.

Many ways to skin this cat. Hope that helps!

7

Thanks, just for reference, I use Payflex and they do have transactions and I think balances. They don’t always get other transactions, but I have seen employee/employer contributions, so I do think they catch what I need.

1 Like