Writing 2 min read
Introducing: recurring bills and subscriptions
Rent, salary and the subscriptions you forget: set a rule once in Money Diary and it writes the transaction on schedule until you stop it.
Zain Haroon — Full-stack Engineer
The charges that hurt are the ones you stopped noticing. Rent leaves on the 1st, salary lands mid-month, and somewhere in between sit four subscriptions you have not thought about since you signed up.
Logging those by hand is busywork, and busywork is what kills a tracker. So Money Diary takes the rule once and writes the transactions itself.
Turning a transaction into a rule
The easiest way in is a transaction you already logged. Take this month’s Netflix charge, make it recurring, and the rule inherits everything: the title, the amount, the category, the account it came out of. You pick the cadence — weekly, monthly or yearly — and that is the setup done.
The link back to that original transaction is deliberate. Delete the transaction and the rule goes with it, so you never end up with a rule quietly generating entries for something you removed on purpose.
What it writes
On schedule, the rule creates a real transaction in your ledger: same amount, same category, same payment account, so your balances move the way they would have if you had typed it. Nothing sits in a separate “bills” universe that your spending charts never see.
The dashboard shows what is coming under Upcoming, with the next run date and the amount, and a cancel control on each one.
Ending a rule
Three ways to stop, and they cover the cases that actually come up:
- Pause it. The rule stays but stops firing, for the gym membership you froze for two months.
- Set an end date. For a lease that runs to December, or a course you pay monthly until it finishes.
- Set a number of occurrences. Twelve instalments and done. The rule counts what it has created and closes itself out when it hits the total.
Once a rule ends, it stops. It does not sit dormant waiting to surprise you a year later.
What this is not
It is not a budget. Money Diary does not ask you to forecast a month and then scold you for missing it. A recurring rule is bookkeeping: this payment happens, it happens on this day, stop making me type it.
If you want to know where the money went, that is the analytics page, and the subscription category is usually where the answer hides.