My Spending Report with Budget Watch Questions

Eligible accounts include consumer and business credit card, debit card, and checking accounts that are accessed through Wells Fargo Online^®. Bill Pay transactions will also be tracked by My Spending Report with Budget Watch.

My Spending Report with Budget Watch is updated each business day.

Your transactions in My Spending Report with Budget Watch can only be viewed by you, the account owner. Wells Fargo can research specific transactions if you call customer service with questions, but we do not have the ability to view your categorized information as it appears in My Spending Report with Budget Watch.

For more information, please read about our commitment to Privacy and Security.

My Spending Report with Budget Watch is available at no additional cost for Wells Fargo Online^® customers who have a Wells Fargo checking account or credit card.

No. This is a supplemental report that is meant to provide you with a combined overview of your expenses.

My Spending Report with Budget Watch uses Wells Fargo-defined categories, and only includes purchases and payments from your Wells Fargo credit card, debit card, checking account, and Bill Pay service. Financial management software can include a broader picture of your finances, such as savings and other liability accounts.

Budget Watch allows you to create a simple, online budget in just minutes. Updated each business day, My Spending Report with Budget Watch provides you with daily Money In and Money Out flows, so you can see how close you are to meeting your budget goals.

With Budget Watch, you can also:

• Monitor your progress with customized charts and graphs that help you compare your spending and overall performance to your budget goals.
• Periodically adjust your Budget Watch goals to better align them with your spending patterns and help keep you on track with your budget now and in the future.
• Set up optional alerts to help you stay on top of your spending.

Using your historical spending patterns as a guide, you can set Monthly Goals. Your Budget Watch offers two different ways to create your Monthly Goals:

• Take a shortcut – from the drop-down menu, select either Average monthly spending or Last month’s spending and click Continue to automatically copy the selected amounts in the Monthly Goals column in the Budget Entry screen. If you identify categories where you could spend less, or need to spend more, you can always edit the amount you set aside for individual categories.
• Enter your goals by hand – from the drop-down menu, select Custom numbers and proceed to the Budget Entry screen where you will be able to click a category to expand and enter amounts for individual sub-categories. Budget Watch will total your changes automatically. Create a goal for each category or address only a few key categories – the choice is yours.

Once you’re satisfied with the Monthly Goals you’ve created, click Save to view your Budget Watch as part of your Spending Report to see how your goals compare to your actual spending for the month.

Your Budget Watch goals are easy to update:

1. At the top of the Budget Watch tab, click Edit Budget.
2. To make adjustments to the amounts you have budgeted for each category, click the master category and edit the sub-categories directly. Your totals will automatically calculate. If you want to update all your categories at the same time to better reflect your more recent spending, click the Reset drop-down menu and choose Average monthly spending, or Last month's spending. Your budget values will reset to zero when you choose Custom spending amounts.
3. Click Save.

At the top of your report, click the Standard Report tab. This will exclude Budget Watch Monthly Goals from My Spending Report, allowing you to view your spending compared to your historical averages.

The Budget Summary section at the top of your report provides a summary of your Money Out subtracted from your Money In, resulting in What’s Left. The amount you have listed as What's Left is an approximation of your monthly net inflows and outflows. This is the difference between your total deposits and total spending at the end of each month. The Available Balance found on your Account Activity screen, is how much you actually have in your account. 

Note: What’s Left amounts will differ for Wells Fargo credit customers, since credit card spending is automatically included in My Spending Report (unless you choose to exclude it).

The amount you have listed as What’s Left can be a valuable indicator of how much money you have remaining on a monthly basis to apply toward long-term financial goals, such as reducing debt or building savings. If the amount you have listed as What’s Left each month is less than zero, this suggests that you may be spending more than you have coming in each month. If you would like to learn more about the ways in which you can increase What’s Left each month, start paying down debt, or build your savings, please call us at 1-800-869-3557 or talk to a banker at your nearest Wells Fargo location.

With optional Budget Watch email alerts, we let you know when your spending is at 75% of your budget, tell you when you’ve gone over your budget, or provide a status report of your mid-month spending.

To set up email alerts, simply sign on to Wells Fargo Online or visit the Alerts page to learn more.

The current month-to-date, the prior two months, and an average of up to your last 12 months of spending are displayed in the Standard Report screen. The Budget Watch tab displays your historical spending set against your Monthly Goals. An additional 15 months of history can be displayed on screen by clicking the month toggle arrow.

From January to June of each year, you can download a Year End Summary report for the prior calendar year spending, either as an Excel worksheet or a PDF file. At any time, you can download your categorized spending history report in either Excel or PDF format if you have less than 10,000 total transactions. Transactions in the downloadable reports will be automatically sorted by category and date.

My Spending Report with Budget Watch defaults to include spending from any account you access via Wells Fargo Online, including: Wells Fargo credit card, debit card, checking account, and Bill Pay service.

To temporarily change your view to include just one payment method, simply select Credit Cards, Debit Cards, Other Checking Activity, or Bill Pay from the dropdown menu at the top of the Standard Report screen and click Go.

The default view for My Spending Report with Budget Watch includes all your eligible accounts. To change your future view to include spending from specific accounts, simply click Edit Accounts in the Accounts Included In Your Report box in the top right of the page and select only the accounts you wish to include. You can customize up to 30 accounts. The selection you make will remain in effect until you elect to change it.

You can choose which accounts appear in the Year End Summary and Spending History reports in two ways: 1) To include specific accounts in the download, use the Edit Accounts feature in the Accounts Included in Your Report box, or 2) to view a downloadable report by payment method, such as credit cards, debit cards, other checking activity or Bill Pay, select the payment method from the drop-down menu at the top of the Standard Report, click Go and then click the link in the downloads section.

From the browser menu, choose Print. If necessary, adjust the browser default margin settings. You can also download a Year End Summary or Spending History report in PDF format. If you do not have a PDF reader, download Adobe Acrobat^® Reader. These reports are also available in Excel format.

My Spending Report with Budget Watch includes your Money In and Money Out. Your Money In includes any deposits, transfers, or advances made into your account. Your Money Out represents any transactions that are considered spending or payments from your Wells Fargo credit card, debit card, checking account, and Bill Pay service, along with transfers to other Wells Fargo and external accounts.

At the bottom of your report is the Budget Summary section. It provides a summary of your Money Out, subtracted from your Money In. What's Left is approximately how much you have left at the end of each month. This is one indicator of funds you may have available to pay down debt or build savings.

Visa^® has assigned every merchant a specific category or classification. When you make a purchase, Wells Fargo receives this classification information, as well as information about your purchases. We use this classification to categorize your transaction. If your purchase was made with a large company, we cannot specify from which department your item was purchased. For example, the Home department at Macy's^®.

We have assigned Bill Pay payees to default Wells Fargo spending categories. If we are unable to determine a default category for the payee, we will classify the payments based on the category you choose in Bill Pay when setting up the payee or making the payment. You can always create a user-defined rule on the transaction screen to set a new default category for a payee.

Uncategorized Payments transactions are transactions that we are unable to assign to a category because the payee is either unavailable or can’t be assigned to a default category. At this time, we can’t assign some paper checks and electronic payments to merchant categories.

Wells Fargo credit card payments are excluded from your Total Spending because doing so could result in an overstatement of your Total Spending.

Checks written to individuals or small merchants are classified in Checks Written. This is done because we are unable to assign a payee to the transaction. You can re-categorize these payments on the Transactions screen. You can also create an amount-based, user-defined rule on this screen, if you want to assign a default category to recurring check payments of a specific dollar amount.

Checks Written may also include payments to your Wells Fargo credit card. This could also include payments to your credit card made from your checking account. Due to this, your monthly Total Spending may be overstated.

This category includes transactions that are processed electronically but cannot be classified in a specific category.

You can re-categorize these payments individually in the Transactions screen. If you’d like to assign a default category to a recurring Electronic Payment, you can create a user-defined categorization rule in the Transactions screen.

If you are new to Wells Fargo Online^®, or if you have added or removed accounts from Wells Fargo Online^®, older transactions may not be available to My Spending Report with Budget Watch. For example, if you are a new Wells Fargo Online customer, you will only have transaction history available for a period of up to 90 days prior to the date that you link an account for Wells Fargo Online.

When you download a report from a payment method screen (such as credit cards, debit cards, other checking activity or Bill Pay) it will only include transactions for that payment method.

If one of your accounts is replaced by a new one, the transactions you made on the old account will continue to be displayed in My Spending Report with Budget Watch. However, the transactions from the old account will be associated with the new account.

Yes. On the Standard Report or Budget Watch screen, choose Manage Transactions. Here you can view all transactions for the time periods currently in the Summary view. You can choose the category drop-down menu on a specific transaction and choose a new subcategory. To see a filtered view of the transactions from that category/month, and re-categorize the transactions, you can click any of the dollar amounts in the drop-down menu.

Choose a specific transaction in the Transaction screen and select Create a Rule. You can choose to apply all transactions of a certain payee or amount to a particular category.

Note: All transaction rules can be applied to either future transactions only or past and future transactions. If you apply the rule to past and future transactions, you have the option to exclude historical transactions that you individually re-categorized.

Transactions made with eligible business and consumer accounts are included in My Spending Report with Budget Watch, so purchases made using your business debit card will be displayed.

If you have any questions about any individual transactions on My Spending Report with Budget Watch, please contact Wells Fargo.

• For questions concerning a transaction on your Wells Fargo Credit Card, please call 1-800-642-4720.
• For questions concerning a transaction from your Wells Fargo checking account, please call 1-800-TO-WELLS (1-800-869-3557).
• For questions regarding a transaction on your business accounts, call the National Business Banking Center at 1-800-225-5935.