Recurring & Bills Overview

How Forbidden Finance automatically detects recurring transactions, tracks upcoming bills, and forecasts your cash flow.

Overview

Forbidden Finance monitors your transaction history to identify recurring charges like subscriptions, utility bills, loan payments, and regular income. Once detected, these patterns become recurring rules that power your upcoming bills calendar, cash flow forecast, and payment reminders. You always stay ahead of what is coming in and going out.

Recurring detection works automatically when you have a connected bank account or enough manual transactions to establish a pattern. You can also create rules manually for charges that the system has not picked up yet, or for future expenses you know are coming.

How Recurring Detection Works

When Forbidden Finance spots a transaction that repeats with a consistent merchant, amount, and interval, it creates a suggested rule. The system classifies each rule into one of five types:

Type	Examples
Subscription	Streaming services, software, gym memberships
Bill	Rent, utilities, insurance premiums
Income	Salary, freelance payments, side income
Loan	Mortgage payments, auto loans, student loans
Transfer	Regular moves between your own accounts

Detected frequencies include weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, and annual. Each rule includes a 10% amount tolerance by default, so small price changes (like a streaming service adjusting by a dollar) are still matched correctly.

What You Can Do

Review suggested rules — Confirm or dismiss auto-detected patterns from the Recurring tab.
Create manual rules — Add rules for charges that have not appeared yet or that the system missed.
Pause and resume — Temporarily pause a rule without deleting it when a subscription is on hold.
Track upcoming bills — See the next 7 days of expected charges on your dashboard widget.
Forecast cash flow — View 30, 60, and 90-day projections of money in and money out.
Get notified — Receive reminders 3 days before a bill is due and alerts if a payment is missed.
Batch actions — Confirm or dismiss multiple suggested rules at once.

Key Concepts

Occurrence lifecycle — Each expected payment follows a lifecycle: it starts as Expected when it is upcoming, moves to Pending when a matching transaction appears and is being processed, and resolves as Matched once confirmed. If no matching transaction arrives by the due date, it is flagged as Missed.

Cash flow forecast — Your forecast combines all active recurring rules to project your account balance forward. Incoming rules (income, inbound transfers) add to the projection, while outgoing rules (bills, subscriptions, loans) subtract from it.