Auto-Detected Recurring Transactions

How Forbidden Finance analyzes your transaction patterns to automatically identify recurring charges, and how to review and manage suggested rules.

Overview

Forbidden Finance continuously analyzes your transaction history to find charges that repeat on a predictable schedule. When the system identifies a pattern with enough confidence, it creates a suggested recurring rule for you to review. This saves you from manually tracking every subscription, bill, and regular payment.

Auto-detection looks at three factors: the merchant name, the transaction amount (within a tolerance), and the time interval between charges. When all three align across multiple occurrences, the system surfaces a suggestion.

How Detection Works

The detection engine scans your transactions and groups them by merchant. Within each merchant group, it looks for amount consistency and regular timing. Here is what it evaluates:

Merchant matching — Transactions from the same merchant are grouped together, even when the merchant name varies slightly between charges.
Amount consistency — The system uses a 10% tolerance by default. A subscription that charges $9.99 one month and $10.49 the next is still recognized as the same recurring charge.
Frequency detection — The engine identifies weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, and annual patterns based on the gap between transactions.
Confidence scoring — Rules with more data points and tighter consistency receive higher confidence. High-confidence rules are auto-suggested for your review.

How to Review Suggested Rules

Open the Recurring tab

Navigate to Recurring & Bills from the main menu. Suggested rules appear at the top of the screen with a badge showing how many are pending review.

Review each suggestion

Tap a suggestion to see its details: merchant name, detected amount, frequency, and the transactions that matched the pattern. Verify that the detection looks correct.

Confirm or dismiss

Tap Confirm to turn the suggestion into an active recurring rule. Tap Dismiss if the pattern is a coincidence or something you do not want to track. Dismissed suggestions do not come back.

Use batch actions for multiple suggestions

If you have several suggestions waiting, tap Select All or check individual items, then use the batch action bar to confirm or dismiss them all at once.

What Happens After You Confirm

Once you confirm a suggested rule, it becomes an active recurring rule. Forbidden Finance then:

Adds upcoming occurrences to your bill calendar.
Includes the rule in your 30/60/90-day cash flow forecast.
Sends you a reminder 3 days before the next expected occurrence.
Monitors for missed payments and alerts you if one does not arrive on time.

You can edit any confirmed rule later to adjust the amount, frequency, tolerance, or notification preferences.

Confidence Levels

Not all detections are equal. The system assigns a confidence level based on how many matching transactions it found and how consistent they are:

High confidence — Multiple matches with tight amount and timing consistency. These appear as top suggestions.
Medium confidence — Fewer data points or some variation in amount or timing. Still likely recurring, but worth a closer look.
Low confidence — Only two matches or significant variation. These may appear further down the list or require more transaction history before surfacing.