Recurring items
Recurring (in the sidebar, after Transactions) holds the money you expect to move on a schedule: paychecks, bills, card and loan payments, and transfers between your own accounts. It's the data behind Until payday and the Forecast, so those two are only as good as what's entered here.
Added in 0.2.0.
An item is a schedule plus legs
Each item has a kind, a schedule, and one leg per account it touches. A leg is a signed amount on one account, the same way a transfer in the ledger is two transaction rows rather than one row with a pointer:
| Kind | Legs | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Bill | One negative leg, on the account that pays it | Rent, −1,800 from Checking |
| Income | One or more positive legs | A paycheck split +2,000 to Checking and +300 to Savings |
| Transfer | Two legs that cancel out, on any two of your accounts | −200 from Checking, +200 to Sinking Funds |
| Debt payment | Two legs that cancel out; the receiving account must be a credit card or loan | −450 from Checking, +450 to the car loan |
The form asks for positive amounts and the kind supplies the sign. An item has at most 10 legs, each account appears once, and a zero amount is refused, because it moves nothing. A bill or income can have an optional category, which must be an expense or income category to match. Transfers and debt payments have no category, because they move money without spending it.
Schedules
| Frequency | Shown as | Notes |
|---|---|---|
monthly | Monthly | On the 29th–31st, clamps to the last day of shorter months |
biweekly | Every 2 weeks | Counted from the first date |
semimonthly | Twice a month | Two days you choose, 1st and 15th by default. The earlier day is the 27th at the latest, so the two never land on the same day in February |
weekly | Weekly | |
quarterly | Every 3 months | Clamps to month end like monthly |
annual | Yearly | Clamps to month end (Feb 29 → Feb 28) |
once | Once | A single future item, such as a one-off bill |
daily | Daily |
The first date is an anchor for the schedule. It is never shown as "due". The next due date is always worked out on the server from the schedule and your today (see Time zone). An optional last date ends the series.
Edit, end or delete
- Edit rewrites the whole series, past and future. It's for fixing a mistake, not for "from now on".
- End stops the series today. Nothing after today is expected, and the item moves behind Show ended. To change an amount from now on, end the old item and add a new one.
- Delete removes the item entirely and can't be undone.
The monthly tiles
The tiles at the top total Income, Bills and debt payments and Left over, per month. Each item is converted with exact factors rather than rounded ones: biweekly is 26/12 a month, not 2.17, and weekly is 52/12. Transfers between your own accounts aren't counted, because they don't change what you have.
Settings on the Accounts page
Two per-account settings feed recurring items. Both live on the Accounts page, and only apply to checking and savings accounts:
- Buffer: the lowest balance you want to keep in the account. Until payday and the forecast warn before a bill takes the account below it. Zero or more; zero means no buffer.
- Safe to spend: whether the account counts toward Until payday's "safe to spend" total. Checking accounts start counted (existing ones were backfilled that way in 0.2.0, so nobody's number changed on upgrade). A savings account can opt in. A checking account you use for money set aside, such as yearly expenses, can opt out. It is still projected and still warned about, just not added to the total.
Deleting an account, or moving its history
An account can't disappear from under a recurring item. When you delete an account that has history, the dialog lists every recurring item with a leg on it before anything happens, and what happens depends on the choice you make:
- Delete the history: each listed item is removed entirely, including a split paycheck's leg on another account. A forecast that silently pays less is harder to notice than an item that is gone.
- Move the history to another account: each item says what will happen
to it once you pick the target.
- Moved: the leg moves to the target account.
- Combined: the item already has a leg on the target (a paycheck split across both, for example), so the two legs are added together and it keeps paying the same total.
- Removed: a transfer or debt payment between the two accounts would become a transfer from an account to itself, so it's deleted.
Did it land?
Once a paycheck or bill has posted, match the transaction to the occurrence it paid, so Until payday and the Forecast stop counting it as still to come. A single occurrence can also be skipped, moved or given a different amount without touching the rest of the series. See Matching.
For the endpoints behind this page, see API reference.