Bills

What a scheduled bill is

A scheduled bill tells Tovari that a certain amount is expected to leave (or arrive in) a certain account on a certain date, and to keep expecting it on whatever rhythm you set — monthly, weekly, twice a month, quarterly, yearly, and so on. A one-time item is allowed too, for a single future payment you want counted.

A schedule is a forecast, never an entry

Tovari never posts a bill for you. A schedule cannot create a transaction on its own, no matter how long it has been due. Its job is to let your projections and your Safe to Spend figure take the payment into account before it happens. The only thing that turns an expected payment into a real one in your register is you.

That is the single most important thing on this page, and it is why a bill can sit unpaid for weeks without anything appearing in your account.

Next due is measured from the schedule, not from today

Each bill carries its own next payment date — the first occurrence Tovari still considers outstanding. Everything else is worked out from there, which has two consequences worth knowing:

• A bill whose first payment is in the past shows up overdue straight away, dated on the day it was actually due, rather than quietly starting from today.
• An occurrence you never dealt with does not expire. It stays outstanding, and shows as overdue on its real date, until you enter it or skip it. A backlog is visible rather than silently discarded.

The next payment date is editable at any time, which is the manual way to reset a schedule or push it past an occurrence you do not want to deal with individually.

Enter and Skip

Every outstanding occurrence offers the same two actions, and only one of them writes anything.

Action	What it writes	What it does to the schedule
Enter	Records the payment in the register, prefilled from the bill — payee, category, account and amount	Moves the schedule past that occurrence
Skip	Nothing at all	Moves the schedule past that occurrence

So Skip means “this one did not happen, move on”. It does not cancel the bill, and the next occurrence appears as normal.

Enter does not blindly create a row. If your bank has already reported that payment, Tovari attaches the occurrence to the transaction that is already there instead of leaving you with two copies of the same payment. And if the payment is still pending at your bank, Tovari says so and asks you to confirm rather than entering a duplicate on top of money that is already in flight. Where no existing transaction fits, the occurrence is recorded as a new, not-yet-cleared row.

When more than one bank row could be this payment, Tovari asks you which. Occasionally a handful of pending or not-yet-cleared rows in the same account are an equally good fit for an occurrence — a subscription that charges the same amount every week, say. Rather than guess, Tovari marks the occurrence Choose payment and lists every row it is torn between, each with its date, description and amount, so you can pick the one that is actually this bill. If none of them are, None of these posts the occurrence as its own new row instead. The same tied bank rows are marked in the register too, so you can start the same choice from whichever side you noticed first — the schedule or the bank activity — and picking from one clears the mark from the other.

Pausing, finishing and deleting

A paused bill keeps its history and its settings but has nothing outstanding, so it offers no Enter or Skip at all. A schedule that has run to its end — a one-time item you entered, or a recurring one that reached its final payment — is treated as completed and is hidden from the everyday list until you ask to see completed items. Deleting a bill removes the schedule; the transactions you already entered from it stay in your register.

Suggested recurring payments

When a bank connection shows the same payment arriving over and over with no schedule to match it, Tovari offers it as a suggestion: a proposal for a bill you have not created yet. Nothing is scheduled until you save it, and you can dismiss a suggestion you do not want (and restore it later if you change your mind).

A suggestion arrives prefilled — the payee, the rhythm it appears to follow, a category, a first date, and the typical amount. That amount is an estimate drawn from what the payment has actually been, not a promise about the next one, and Tovari offers you a choice of figures to start from. Every field is yours to change before you save, and each suggestion shows the recent payments it was inferred from so you can check the pattern rather than take it on trust.

Where suggestions appear. They are offered on the computer layout and in the Tovari mobile app. They are not part of the phone-browser layout — open Tovari on a computer, or use the mobile app, to review them.

Web

The Bills & Schedule screen

Bills & Schedule is in the left-hand navigation. Its header shows how many bills are active and what they add up to each month — out, in, and the net of the two — scoped to whichever accounts you have filtered to.

The toolbar above the list carries:

• Add Bill, which opens the editor panel.
• An account filter, defaulting to all accounts.
• Type filters — All, Recurring, One-time.
• View Options, which is where Show Completed Items lives.
• Search bills.

Creating and editing a schedule

The editor panel takes the amount and whether it is money out or in, the account, a category, an optional memo carried onto the transaction when you enter one, the frequency with whatever day-of-month or day-of-week control that frequency needs, and the first payment date. It autosaves — there is no Save button.

If you set a first payment in the past, the editor checks that you meant it before keeping the date. Once a schedule is running, its next payment date is editable directly.

Entering and skipping

Outstanding occurrences appear at the top of the account’s register, in the Scheduled Bills section, each with a tick to enter it and a cross to skip it, and each showing the balance the account is projected to have once it lands.

Suggested recurring

The Bills screen carries a Suggested Recurring block among the bills themselves, collapsed by default with a count in its header, so a proposal and the schedules you already have line up column for column. The register carries the same suggestions in its own collapsed section, and a transaction that belongs to a detected recurring payment is marked in the row so you can open the proposal from where you noticed it.

On a phone browser

Opening the web app on a phone gives you the bills as two tabs — what is Upcoming this month, and All bills, which includes paused and completed ones — under a band showing what is still owed this month. You can add, edit, pause, enter and skip from here, and search the list (the search is per-visit and is not remembered).

Not in this layout: suggested recurring payments, per-column sorting, filtering by several accounts at once, and the balance projection chart. Use View Desktop Site in the More menu if you need them.

Mobile

The Bills screen

Bills is one of the tabs in the bottom bar. The screen shows your schedules as a timeline, grouped and ordered by when each is next due, under a band summarising the month. A row of All, Recurring and One-time stays on screen beneath it for the switch you make most often.

Search is its own control in the header: tap it and the list narrows as you type. Closing the field clears what you typed, and the search is never carried over to your next visit. The rest — which accounts to include, the sort, and whether paused or completed schedules are shown — lives in the Filter & Sort sheet behind the funnel in the header, where nothing changes until you commit it with Done or the Show N bills button at the foot of the sheet, and Reset puts the sheet back to its defaults. A dot on the funnel means a filter is narrowing the list; an active search does not raise it, because the search field is already there in front of you.

Creating and editing a schedule

Tap the + in the header for the New Bill sheet: amount, account, category, frequency and first payment, then Save. Tapping an existing bill opens the same sheet to edit it.

Entering and skipping

There are two routes to the same two actions:

• The action strip. A bill due within the next week shows an inline Enter / Skip pair under its row. If an Enter fails, that button becomes Try again in place, and Skip stays available — a failed Enter has not used the occurrence up.
• Swipe or long-press. On iOS, swipe a row right for Enter and Skip; swipe left for Pause or Resume, Edit and Delete. A long swipe fires the first action of the set it revealed, which on the left side is deliberately the reversible one, so a careless swipe can never delete a schedule. On Android, long-press the row for the same menu.

A paused bill has nothing outstanding, so it offers no Enter or Skip rather than an action that would be refused.

Suggested recurring

The app carries a Suggested recurring strip, collapsed by default with the count visible, that opens into one card per proposal — each showing the payee, the rhythm, the typical amount and the payments behind it, with the options to schedule it or dismiss it. If you have no bills at all yet, the empty screen leads with those suggestions, so your first bill can come from what your bank already shows.

Related pages

• Scheduling a bill — the short version, as part of the Quick start.
• Transactions — the register the Scheduled Bills section sits in, and what an entered bill looks like once it is there.
• Safe to Spend — how outstanding bills shape the headline figure.
• Budget — the monthly envelopes your bills are paid out of.
• Bank connections — where the activity behind a suggestion comes from.
• Where each feature works — the platform map for every documented feature.