Understanding Recurring Budget Items

The recurring items feature in Clear-Budget streamlines the budgeting process, saving you time and effort. By allowing you to set recurring expenses and income, it eliminates the need to manually re-enter the same information each month. When it’s time to renew your budget for a new period, all it takes is a single click to carry over your recurring items, making the process quick and hassle-free. This feature ensures your budget is always up-to-date, so you can focus on managing your finances with ease.

Imagine you have monthly expenses like rent, utilities, and subscriptions, as well as a steady paycheck. With Clear-Budget's recurring items feature, you set these up once, and they automatically roll over into each new budget period. At the start of the month, instead of re-entering everything, you simply click a button to renew your budget, and all your recurring items are ready to go. This leaves you more time to focus on tracking new expenses and meeting your financial goals.

Adding a Recurring item:

If you followed the Getting Started guide, then you are probably familiar with this menu and may have played around with the Recurring options. 

This is the Add Budget Item menu. You can find it by clicking  + Add Budget Item ad the bottom of your budget page. In this menu you enter the Item Name, Amount, Initial date of the item, select the recurring frequency and what category the item falls under.

When setting up a recurring item the date will always be the first occurrence of your item. Clear-Budget will then create new items in the interval you selected under the Recurring menu. These intervals are.

•    Never – Creates only one occurrence of the budget item at the specified date.
•    Weekly – Creates budget items for the same weekday every week.
•    Bi-Weekly – Creates budget items for the same weekday every other week.
•    Monthly – Creates budget items for the same day of month every month.

An example of this is adding your income. Say you are paid every two weeks. Fill in your information about the income then select Bi-Weekly from the Recurring menu and the budget will populate and look like the below image.

From here you can add more recurring items, and they will fill in your budget the same way. 

Question:

What will happen if I enter recurring values on the same start date? – The new budget items will occupy a position after the budget item of the same date. Like above with your income, any expense added on the same date will fill in after the income and any additional item will fill in after the last item of the same date.

Renewing your budget with Recurring Items:

Say you manage your budget quarterly and don’t want to start from scratch each quarter. You can simply renew your budget. But renewing a budget only works for items that are Recurring because these items should be the only ones to continue.

You can renew your budget from the Budgets page. Just click the three dots to the left of your budget and select Renew.

This will open a menu. From here you can rename and change the description of your budget and select the starting month and year. Once filled out click + Renew Budget and you’re done. Now all you need to do is add the non-recurring items or make some adjustments. That’s it.