LifeCycle®
LifeCycle
®
User Manual
5. Bill Creation
Let's make a bill. Get information about one bill. Is it recurring? Who pays it (which account)? Does it automatically draw money from an account (autoPay)? And so on. You'll fill in the information for a bill as detailed below.
- Open LifeCycle.
- Tap Manage.
- Tap Bills.
- Tap the '+' in the upper right. A "New Bill" will appear in the Bills list.
Be aware that it will not necessarily be on top if bills exist for today or prior dates.
- Tap on the "New Bill".
- Fill in the form about your bill. You will need to:
- enter the Name
of the bill
- enter the Balance:
this is the current balance of the bill.
- enter the Budget:
this is what you expect to pay (maximum) for this bill in a month. If this is a non-discretionary bill (such as a mortgage) then the Budget and the Balance will be the same. If this is a descretionary bill (such as a credit card) then this is the expected due at the end of each month. For some bills, such as Water bills or Electric bills, you will have to update these value when you get a new bill each month.
- The Ref/Note
is for whatever you'd like: a note about the bill, a reference number when you pay it. It is your note field.
- AutoPay: no this app will not pay your bill for you. But this is a marker for your reference that this bill will automatically pull from your account when due. Many subscriptions will do this, such as Netflix.
- Subscription: again is a note to you that this is a subscription style bill -- a recurring bill each month that can be cancelled if you desired. Bills marked Subscription will appear also in the Subscription section of the Manage tab.
- Pay Date is the date that you expect to pay the bill. It is used in this app to remind you that the bill is ready to be paid.
- Due Date is the date on your bill when it is due; after this date the company you owe the bill to will consider it late.
- Set End Date: This allows you to set an ending date for a bill. If you have a bill that will have 6 payments, and then it is complete, this allows you to set that end date.
** bills with no End Date
will compute every cycle for all future calculations; bills with an End Date will stop computing after the End Date.
When you tap Set End Date a confirmation will appear to confirm you want to set an End Date. If you do, another date picker will appear and allow you to set the End Date.
If an End Date is set on a bill, then a
Clear End Date
link will appear to clear the End Date.
- Recurring: Set this to 'Yes' if the bill recurs -- such as a mortgage payment that will be the same each cycle. Set this to 'No' if the Balance will change due to discretionary spending -- this would be a credit card.
- Cycle is how often this bill is due. You can set it to anything from Weekly, to Monthly, to Annually, etc.
- Every is a cycle count time. If you set this to 2 and your Cycle is set to Monthly, then this means the bill will be paid once every 2 months. Thus you can set annually by selecting Annual, or my selecting Monthly and setting Every to 12.
** Note that Monthly and Weekly x4 are NOT the same thing. There are 12 months in a year; 52 weeks in a year. If Weekly x4 is substituted for Monthly you will only get 48 weeks.
- Payer is the Account where the money to pay this bill will come out of. Payer may also be a Bill that is a Credit Card.
- Paid via: Self is a bill you pay; Other is a bill someone might pay you money to pay. This is simply a reference for your noting.
- Include in Totals: this bill will be included in any debt totals shown on the main screens.
- Exclude from Summary: in the bottom left of the main screen there is a summary of the bills you owe in a month; this will exclude this bill from that.
- Is Credit Card: turn this on if this bill is a Credit Card; if this is on, this bill can pay other bills. If you do that, the bill being paid will have the payment deducted; this bill will have it added.
- Exempt from COL: (Cost of Living) In future calculation, say over the next 25 years, if this bill will go up due to inflation (cost of living) then leave this off; if you don't want this bill to change in future calculations, then turn this on. A mortgage is a good example of this. Mortgages do not tend to change, except for escrow adjustments -- your mortgage was established over a 30 year period (for example).
- Alternate COL - COL is set in the Settings and is applicable to all bills that have COL not exempted. If a given bill should have a different inflationary value, set it here.
- Save in the upper right will save the bill.
- Pay Bill: will be active on a saved bill. Tapping this will pay the bill. The Pay Date and Due Date will be moved forward by the Cycle, and thus it will move down in the Bills list. If the bill is not recurring, then the Balance will be set to $0.00.
Don’t worry if you forget a bill or an income at first. You can always add more later, or delete those that don’t apply. The granularity that you want to track is up to you. For instance, if you pay certain subscriptions or other items with a Visa card, you may simply want to track the Visa card and what you pay at the end of the month. On the other hand, you may want to create a bill for each item that will be paid for with the Visa card (you can do this with bank accounts and credit cards). In this way you pay each individual item when they are charged to the card. The app will mark the item paid and will increase your card balance (or debit your bank account as paid).
Please understand that the information is under your control, and is not linked to any bank or card institution. So you will need to enter and edit the values in the app by hand at certain points in time if you are not using item by item granularity.