Adding your bills in PocketGuard allows you to set aside a portion of your income required to pay them on time and calculate how much is left "IN MY POCKET".
What you should tag as a bill
All your fixed recurring expenses, like
- Cell phone;
- Utilities;
- Mortgage or Rent;
- Gym membership;
- Subscriptions (like Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, etc.);
- Insurance;
What you should NOT tag as a bill
Expenses that are spread throughout the month, like
- Friday beer with your colleagues;
- Savings;
- Credit card payments*;
- Groceries;
*What about credit card payments?
Do NOT track your credit card payments as a recurring expense in PocketGuard as we mark those payments to your credit card company as transfers.
The reason for this is simple. Every time you swipe your credit card to make a general purchase, that amount is debited from your “In My Pocket”. In PocketGuard’s eyes, you have just paid for the item. In reality, your credit card company is floating you the money and you technically have not paid for it.
Therefore, the “payment” to your credit card company is just a transfer (see “Transfers”). You are transferring funds from an account with a positive balance to an account with a negative balance. Such transactions are marked as “TO” and “FROM”.
NOTE: if you hide one of the accounts that take part in a transfer, the TO-FROM chain will be broken and the transactions will no longer be tagged as transfers thus being counted twice.
How to create my recurring bills?
While some recurring bills are identified by PocketGuard automatically, others must be added manually.
To add a recurring bill manually do the following:
- Hit Upcoming bills;
- Tap the “+” sign in the upper right corner;
- Choose a transaction that should be a recurring bill or add your bill manually;
- Enter the name of your bill, its amount, frequency, and choose the next due date.
You can also go to the “Transactions” tab and locate your transaction. Tap the transaction to open the details info and hit the ••• button in the top right corner.
Avoid double-counting
Once the bill is paid, it will be calculated in the “Spending&Budgets” section in “Everything else” (unbudgeted categories). That means you should track your Bills only in the "Bills" section and don't create a category budget for it. In case, you'll create a budget for Bills, they'd be double-counted in the app.
Predicted bills
Once the bill is created, PocketGuard will look at your transactions and tags them with a “Bill” stamp. You will see a breakdown of your already paid and predicted bills for this and the next month.
Next due dates will help you to plan ahead and past due dates will indicate that the bill wasn’t paid.
The amount of the upcoming bill is calculated based on the recurring bills you paid previously or the amount you entered manually.
Skip predicted bills
Now you can skip predicted bill payments if you have already paid them but PocketGuard was unable to recognize the transaction as a part of your recurring bill.
Swipe left on the predicted payment and tap the "X" button.
If you accidentally skipped your bill, you can update the "Next due date" for this bill.
Paid bills
The bill is marked as paid when we see a new transaction that matches the bill name. For example, if the bill is called "NV Energy", the name of the transaction should be "NV Energy", respectively. In case the name of the bill is "NV Energy power" whereas the name of the transaction is "NV energy", they will NOT match.
If unrelated items are showing up in your recurring bill, it is most likely due to the merchant name of that transaction matching the merchant name on your bill.
In this case, you can modify the merchant's name on the transaction. Go into the transaction and either rename it completely or simply add an asterisk or another character to the front of the name. Note that you need to apply the change to this transaction only or you will simply rename the whole bill.
If you have a ‘weekly’ bill, our algorithm will expect 4 or 5 transactions within this month. When the transactions are pulled to the app, the bill will be marked as paid even if the date or amount is different from the one you expected.
Mark as paid
You can also mark your bill as paid manually by doing the following:
- Swipe a bill you’d like to mark as paid;
- Hit the ✅ icon;
- Select a transaction and hit Continue;
NOTE: the transaction will be renamed to your bill name in order to associate it with the bill.
"Just once" bills
When your "Just once" bill is paid or you skip the payment, PocketGuard will automatically mark it as inactive and it will be moved to the “Inactive bills” section.
How to edit or delete a recurring bill?
You can edit or delete bill when you are surfing the list of your upcoming and paid bills. Tap the bill and hit the ••• button in the top right corner.
Tap All bills & subscriptions to see the list of all active and inactive bills. Swipe left on the bill you would like to edit or delete.
Moreover, you can locate a bill transaction in the “Transactions” tab, open “Merchant history”, and hit the ••• button in the top right corner.
You can’t edit the bill name as this is basically the same as creating a new one. However, if you modify the merchant's name on the bill transaction and choose “Apply to all”, the bill will be also updated.
Inactive bills
To stop planning for a bill, hit the ••• button in the top right corner and tap on “Mark as inactive” in the income details. It will then be moved to “Inactive bills” in the “All bills & subscriptions”.
If you ever want to resume planning for your inactive bill, hit the ••• button and choose “Mark as active”.
Comments
5 comments
I am going to try this version first. It sounds very useful and helpful. I have followed Dave Ramsey for budgeting in the past and use credit cards to pay whatever is possible monthly to help track monthly spending. However the fact that this app auto deletes from monies in bank is amazing. Thank you for the tips.
Anna
I use the bill qualification in Pocketguard but am wondering if it is redundant in my case. I rely on complete monthly budgets to track profit/loss and how to reshape my budgets to accomodate that. Sio I am duplicating expenses in "bills" and "budgets' so i have the overall understanding, what to do???
Hi there!
Thank you for reaching out.
The "Upcoming Bills" section includes all your bills that you are going to pay for in the current month. Once the bill is paid, it will be still listed among the unpaid bills in the "Bills" section, however, its calculation will move in the “Spending&Budgets” section in “Everything else” (unbudgeted categories). That means PocketGuard calculate the unpaid bills in the "Bills" section and paid bills in the "Everything else".
We do not recommend creating a category budget for your bills, since they will be double-counted in the "Bills" and "Spending&Budgets" sections.
Please, let us know at support@pocketguard.com in case of any concerns.
Hi there Alex, it says you edited this 7 hours ago, so it is timely that I googled my issue with pocketguard.
I disagree with the way this system is set up. A majority of my expenses are bills (and savings or investments that I view as bills). therefore when I look at my budget and expense tracking, I want to see bills as part of my budget. I like the idea of being able to see the amount of upcoming bills remaining for the month, but I dont know why bills would need be categorized as "Everything Else." Also, for variable bills, like water, gas, and electric, I like to see (as a budget item) how much I spent compared to expectations or other months.
The app seemed intuitive when I first set up my budgets and bills, but I was really confused why the app kept saying that I was negative thousands of dollars in my pocket.
Hi David,
Thanks for your feedback!
As you may know, in case you allocate money from IN MY POCKET towards the "Bills&Utilities" budget, track bills in the "Bills" section, they would be double-counted. That's why we recommend tracking bills separately in the "Bills" section only. I assume this is the main reason why the IN MY POCKET became negative.
Regarding categorizing your bills as "Everything else" - I will pass your feedback to our team. We are willing to improve the app based on our customers' feedback and make it comfortable for everyone.
Don't hesitate to contact us at support@pocketguard.com in case you have other suggestions or questions related to the PocketGuard app. Have a wonderful day!
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