Recurring bills in your budget

Bills count before they're paid

Zypper detects recurring payments — subscriptions, utilities, insurance — from your transactions. On the budget page, a bill in a spending category is treated as money already spoken for in the month it's due:

• Expected — an unpaid bill due this month counts at its usual amount from the start of the month, before the charge arrives
• Paid — once the payment lands it counts at the actual amount, on the date it was paid
• Late — a bill that wasn't paid within its usual window keeps counting in the month it was due until it's paid
• Settled — the cycle was covered without a payment of its own being matched to it: by a payment outside its usual window, by a payment you later split, or by a later cycle's payment. Nothing more is owed for it

A category's detail panel lists the month's bills under these headings — Late, Today, Tomorrow, This month, Paid, and Settled — and the pace chart's tooltip shows the bills paid, expected, or missed on any day.

What committed bills do to your numbers

• The row's bar extends an outline past your spending for the bills still due, so you can see how much of the budget they'll take.
• The month's status counts them: if what you've spent plus the bills still due would exceed the budget, the category reads as over before the charges arrive.
• The pace guide steps up by each bill's amount — on the day it was paid, or, while it's still due, on the day it's expected (an unpaid bill due today or earlier is placed on tomorrow, or on the month's last day if that comes first) — so paying a bill doesn't show as running ahead of pace.
• With Hide recurring on, the summary removes recurring payments from spending and the committed amount from the budget, leaving your discretionary picture — see Tracking your spending pace.

Bills count only in spending categories that are included in the budget. A payment you exclude from the budget drops its bill for that cycle, and a bill that stops charging stops being expected.

Money is set aside for bills that come less often than monthly

A monthly bill is owed by the month it lands in. A bill that repeats every three months, six months, or year is different: the month it lands in can't absorb it alone, so the budget has to build up between occurrences. When the bill's category has Roll over unspent budget turned on, Zypper works out how much of the carried balance has to be held back for the bill to be covered on its due date, and shows it as a reserve:

• The row's bar marks the reserved amount as a zone at its end.
• The bar's budget label, the remaining pill, and the panel's equation all state the budget after the reserve — it's money you shouldn't spend on other things.
• Hover the piggy-bank term in the equation for the bills it covers: $X due Mar 15, or $X late since Feb 1 for a missed cycle still being held.

The reserve only exists while rollover is on and its since-month has been reached. Without rollover there's nothing to hold back, and the panel points that out when a non-monthly category overspends: "This category's budget doesn't roll over, so only $X was available this month."

If you're behind — the balance you've built up is less than the next bill needs — the reserve can exceed what's available, and the pill reads $X short instead of remaining. That's the early warning that the next bill won't be covered at the current amount.

For Flex categories the reserve comes out of the shared budget's carried balance, never more than that balance, toward the members' next non-monthly bills.

A non-monthly budget stands in for a bill Zypper hasn't detected

If you budget a category every three months, six months, or a year and Zypper hasn't yet detected a bill of about that size in it, the budget itself is treated as the bill: a charge in the category around the budgeted amount is counted as the recurring payment, and carried balance is held toward the next one. This reserve never exceeds the balance you've actually built up, so it can't warn you that you're short — only a detected bill can. Once a bill of about that size that repeats less often than monthly is detected, it takes over.

Common questions

Can I skip a bill for one month? Not yet. A bill you've canceled stops being expected once it stops charging; to drop it right away, remove its recurring group on the recurring page. If the category is budgeted every three months or longer, its budget keeps standing in for the bill (see above) until you change the category's frequency to monthly.

Why did last month's late bill disappear from this month? A missed bill stays on the month it was due and shows as Late there. It's only carried into later months — as "late since" in the reserve — when it repeats less often than monthly in a category that rolls over, and only until the next cycle of that bill comes due or is paid.

A bill was paid, but the panel still shows it as expected. The payment has to belong to the recurring group. If it arrived under a different name and wasn't matched, select it on the transactions page and assign it to the group.