Subscriptions
Netflix, Spotify, the gym, the app you signed up for last March and forgot. Subscriptions keeps the list, tells you what it costs you every month, and warns you before you get charged.
Why it is a separate register
Subscriptions are kept apart from your transaction ledger on purpose.
If a subscription were just a recurring transaction, it would generate a charge every month and your bank message would generate the real one, and you would end up with two. Keeping the register separate means the app can remind you about a charge without inventing it.
What you enter
Name, cost and cycle, monthly, yearly, fortnightly, and the next billing date, which the app projects forward as time passes. Optionally a website, which gives the service its logo.
Two independent reminders:
- Before it renews, a number of days you choose.
- Before you meant to cancel, for the free trial you promised yourself you would not forget.
The monthly total
One figure at the top: everything normalised to a month, so a yearly plan counts as a twelfth and a fortnightly one counts twice.
With several currencies, that figure is converted to your main currency and marked with ≈, along with the date of the rate used. This is one of the two places in the app that always converts, because there is no currency switch reachable from this screen. The native breakdown per currency is one tap away in See breakdown.
It is a display figure. It never changes your data.
Letting the app record them
Each subscription can be set so the app records the charge itself when the billing date arrives. That turns it into a recurring payment in practice, and it is the only case where a subscription also appears in Recurring payments.
Leave it off and the subscription is a register plus a reminder: you get told, and the actual charge is recorded by your bank message or by you.
Backup
Subscriptions travel in your backup file and, with Pro cloud sync, across devices. If two devices disagree, the most recently edited version wins, which is what you want on a list you edit often.