Recurring expenses

What it's about

In the Recurring area (under Finances), you set up regular expenses – pocket money, say, a cleaner, or a monthly club fee. patchio automatically creates a real expense on the relevant date and splits it according to your template. The shares flow into your balances like any other expense.

A new template starts out as your own: private, with only you involved. Sharing it is a deliberate second step – see below.

Recurring expense or contract?

Both are regular costs – but for different things:

• Recurring expense: a simple, regular entry without any contract paperwork (pocket money, a cleaner, a tip jar). patchio creates it automatically.
• Contract: an ongoing commitment with a notice period, documents and reminders (electricity, insurance, streaming). You settle shared contracts per month under Fixed costs.

Rule of thumb: does it have a notice period or contract paperwork? → Contract. Otherwise → recurring expense. Don't record the same cost item in both, or it'll count twice in your balances.

Receipts here attach to individual expenses, not to the template itself. For a subscription with paperwork – a notice period or a contract PDF, say – create a contract instead: it keeps document storage and the notice period in one place.

Adding one

Tap Add and enter the amount, description, category and paid by. Under Split, only you are ticked at first, and right at the bottom, visibility is set to Private. Then choose the repeat pattern (weekly on certain weekdays, monthly on one day, or yearly) and the start date. Optionally, set an end date.

Sharing it takes two steps, and they sit apart in the dialogue:

1. Under Split, tick the other people (or switch to percentage, shares, or exact amounts).
2. At the very bottom, set visibility to Whole household.

Without step 2, the template stays private – then only you, the people involved, and the person under Paid by see the expenses it creates.

Who sees the template?

• Private here means – as with contracts – not “just me”, but: you, the people in the split, and the person under “Paid by”. Exactly the same people later see the expenses it creates too. For an account, a savings goal or an income entry, “Private” means really just me.
• Whole household – every household member sees the template and the expenses.

If Paid by is set to someone else, the template is visible to them too, even if they're not part of the split. Otherwise they'd have a claim in the balances with no expense to show for it.

Pausing, editing, deleting

• Pausing stops the automatic creation without losing the template – handy when something takes a break for a while. Resuming reactivates it.
• Editing changes the template. Changes apply from the next due date; expenses already created stay as they are.
• Deleting removes the template. Expenses already created stay in your history.

Related topics

• Finances: shared expenses
• Contracts & notice periods
• Settle shared fixed costs