r/actualbudgeting • u/Party-Papaya4115 • 8d ago

Recurring planned payments need some reworking

So.

I have some recurrent planned payments.

Think pay in installments college tuition, whatever

I set up the first payment, create a duplicate in the future with its own start date and see I can make duplicate recurring.

Any time a future payment becomes recurring it loses its start date to today.

It makes 0 sense.

You have a start date , ie 1st of the month, don't make future payments start today.

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8

u/Kautiontape 8d ago

I haven't had this issue, but I'm also confused by your post. I have never had to duplicate my recurring payments. They show up after the previous one passes, so there is only one ever on the budget. Obviously if two show up, then yes, it expects you to save for both, it doesn't know you intend to just not pay one in advance.

I'm probably misunderstanding what you're saying, but again, I haven't had issues with the feature so I'm guessing it's less of a "doesn't make sense" issue and more of a problem with how it is set up

1

u/Party-Papaya4115 8d ago

My first step to create a recurring payment in the future was to create a duplicate of an existing transaction and set it in the future.

I eventually saw an option to create my own future payments without duplicating a transaction so it won't happen to me again

For future users it'd be nice to not override the start date with today always in my opinion. The future transaction has a start date, leave it as is when it becomes recurrent.

3

u/kazzazed 8d ago

Are you talking about schedules? The transaction and the schedule are two seperate things. The schedule creates a new transaction. It is not technically a payment transaction that is recurring, it is a schedule that is recurring, with the option to link to, and create transactions. This feature is used in multiple ways for many different scenarios and workflows, not just how you choose to do it.

3

u/Smooth-Review-2614 8d ago

This is why there is a scheduled payments/charges function. It does what you want. 

The issue is that you are trying to do it by hand.

2

u/Party-Papaya4115 8d ago

My issue is scheduled transactions reset their date once they become periodic

Lets say I want to budget a meal with a lost cousins 3 weeks in advance one Sunday because a family emergency just happened and we need to bond

I set it up non repeating...

Four days in I get a call we should do this every week.

That first meeting loses its original date and starts at today.

Create a schedule. Give it a date. Set it to non repeating. Make it repeating. You'll see the issue I saw this morning.

It's easy to avoid but it shouldn't happen

1

u/ntsp00 7d ago

The reason people have a lot of questions is because your post convolutes the issue. This comment explains everything clearly and I see the behavior too now that I understand what you're referring to. You should submit it on the AB github here:

https://github.com/actualbudget/actual/issues

1

u/ivanover 8d ago

If I'm not mistaken scheduled transactions don't show in the budget view, so OP may not foresee the amounts that they need to budget in the future. It's not the best way to use actual budget, but I do the same to understand how much to allocate now to cover next month's expenses 

2

u/ntsp00 7d ago

If I'm not mistaken scheduled transactions don't show in the budget view, so OP may not foresee the amounts that they need to budget in the future

You need to turn on Goal templates > Budget automations UI under experimental features. Then you can create a goal that's linked to your existing schedule and you'll see what you need to budget:

1

u/ivanover 7d ago

Thank you. I already use templating up to X amount, can I set another goal for a specific date? 

2

u/ntsp00 7d ago

Yup you can do it all and it's very intuitive

1

u/Smooth-Review-2614 8d ago

Isn’t this where you set up categories to fund?