Recurring expenses
What this is for
Rent, insurance, the broadband, the coffee machine lease, the music licence. Costs that arrive on a schedule and that nobody should be typing in by hand twelve times a year.
A recurring expense is a template. Restodesk creates the actual expense from it each time it's due.
Setting one up
Select Add recurring expense.
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Item name | What the bill is. |
| Amount, Category, Vendor | Same as a normal expense. |
| Repeat | Daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly. |
| Issue date | When the schedule starts. |
| Next expense date | The next one due. Leave empty and it's worked out from the issue date and the interval. |
| Day of month | For monthly and longer intervals — the 1st, the 15th. |
| Day of week | For weekly and bi-weekly. |
| Billing cycle | Optional. How many times it should run. |
| Unlimited recurring | It keeps going until you stop it. |
| Create matching expense now | Records one immediately as well as scheduling the next. |
| Bill / attachment | The contract or standing invoice. |
| Status | Active or Inactive. |
Choosing the schedule
Match the bill, not your convenience:
- Monthly — rent, insurance, subscriptions, leases. Most of them.
- Quarterly — utilities on quarterly billing, some rates.
- Yearly — licences, insurance renewals, professional memberships.
- Weekly or bi-weekly — regular service contracts, laundry, waste collection.
- Daily — rare. Usually a sign the cost belongs somewhere else.
Set day of month to the day the bill is actually dated. That keeps the cost in the right period without you thinking about it.
Fixed amounts only
A recurring template carries an amount. It works for costs that don't change: rent, a lease, a subscription.
For bills that vary — a utility that's higher in winter — you have two options:
- Set the template to your typical amount and edit the generated expense when the real bill arrives.
- Don't schedule it at all, and record each bill as it comes.
Either is fine. What isn't fine is leaving an estimate uncorrected and treating it as fact.
Stopping and changing one
- Set it to Inactive to pause without losing the template. Use this for a seasonal cost.
- Edit it when the amount changes — a rent review, a renegotiated contract.
- Delete it when the arrangement ends. Expenses already generated keep their history but stop being linked to the template.
Review these when a contract changes. A recurring expense quietly generating last year's rent is worse than no automation at all, because it looks correct.
Limiting the run
Billing cycle sets how many times it should generate — useful for a fixed-term arrangement like a twelve-month lease. It stops on its own at the end.
Unlimited recurring runs until you make it inactive. Right for rent, wrong for anything with an end date you already know.
Good to know
- Generated expenses are ordinary expenses — editable, filterable, and included in every expense report, marked with a Recurring badge.
- They're created automatically. Nobody has to be signed in for it to happen.
- Create matching expense now is for setting up mid-cycle, when this month's bill has already arrived.
- The attachment is on the template, so a scanned contract stays with the arrangement rather than with one month's entry.