Getting Started

> Billing Accounts are defined as any source of recurring payments. Some examples are the cable bill, a cell phone, rent or mortgage, even car insurance or registration.

An account is either set up based on a billing interval (measured in days) or as a day of the month on which all bills are due. For example, a credit card account that bills you on the 12th of every month would be set up having the billing day of the month set as 12. Alternately, a car insurance account that bills you biannually would have the billing interval set as 182.

Once logged in, by clicking the Accounts link on the navigation that runs vertically down the lefthand side of each page, the user is shown Current Bills. What is presented is a view of the most current unpaid bill for each account, represented as a stickie note, ordered from left to right by the due date. The color coding of the stickie notes is as such: red for past due, orange for this week, and yellow for all others. Should an account have no unpaid bills, no note is displayed.

Email reminders can be enabled for each billing account when creating a new billing account. Reminders may be toggled by editing a billing account's settings through the Accounts > Manage Accounts link. If enabled, an email icon is shown on the stickie note for the account.

Similarly, the link associated for a billing account can be edited on the same page (Accounts > Manage Accounts). This link is useful for storing the url of the login page for accounts that feature online payments. If one defines a url in the account's settings, a link icon pointing to the url on file is rendered on the account's stickie note.

> Bills are, simply put, one instance of a payment due to a billing account. What follows are explanations of a few fields, and their intended usage, for each bill.

Payment Type, whose options are none, check, and credit card, is strictly for own record-keeping purposes, and the information entered is never used by the system for reporting or otherwise.

Amount Due is the field prominently displayed on the stickie note on the Current Bills page. It is not used for reporting purposes, instead Amount Paid is.

Notes is a field provided for any other comments or information you would like to store about a certain bill. It can be used to record the check number you paid a bill with, or the confirmation code of an online payment.

When updating a bill, the Auto-generate next bill checkbox is provided to streamline the process. It's intended use is to be selected when marking the current bill for an account as having been paid, so that a new bill, marked as unpaid, is created. When selected, the due date for the newly created bill is determined based on the account's setting. For accounts set up as having a billing day of the month, the due date is set to that day of the month for the coming month. For those accounts having a billing interval of 90 days, the due date is created 90 days from the current bill's due date. For those bills created with the auto-generate next bill checkbox, the amount due is copied from the current bill. For accounts that bill the same amount each month, no further updates are required until marking it as paid. For others, the amount, once billed, will need to be updated.