Pro Feature

Recurring Transactions

Many of your expenses happen on a predictable schedule — rent on the 1st, Netflix on the 15th, salary every second Friday. Recurring Transactions lets you set these up once and have Pocket Clear log them for you on the right date, every time.

You can create recurring rules for both expenses and income. Each rule carries an amount, a category and optional subcategory, an optional note, a time of day, and a frequency: Monthly, Weekly, Biweekly or Yearly. You can also give a rule an end date, so an EMI, a loan or a trial stops on its own. A rule has no separate name — the note is what shows on the transactions it creates — and it does not carry a payment type, so the transactions it logs have no payment method until you set one on them yourself.

A Monthly rule has a Day of Month picker, any value from 1 to 31. If the chosen day does not exist in a given month — the 31st in February or April — Pocket Clear uses the last day of that month instead, then goes back to your chosen day the following month. Weekly and Biweekly rules pick a day of the week rather than a day of the month. A Yearly rule has no day-of-month field at all: you pick a date under Repeats On and it repeats on that same month and day every year (a 29 February rule falls on the 28th in non-leap years).

Recurring transactions appear in your transaction list just like manually-logged ones. You can edit or delete any individual occurrence without affecting future ones — an edited occurrence is never overwritten or re-created — or you can edit the rule itself to change all future occurrences at once.

How to set up a recurring transaction

Recurring rules are not created from the Add Transaction screen — there is no "Recurring" toggle there. They live on their own screen:

1. Open Settings > Recurring Transactions.
2. Tap the + button in the top bar. The Add Recurring sheet opens.
3. Choose Money Out or Money In, then enter the amount and pick a category (and a subcategory if the category has any). Amount and category are both required before Save will work.
4. Choose the frequency — Monthly, Weekly, Biweekly or Yearly — and then the day of month, day of week, or repeat date that frequency asks for.
5. Optionally set a time of day, a note, and an end date.
6. Tap Save.

Saving stores the rule; it does not log a transaction there and then. Rules are checked the next time you open Pocket Clear, and an occurrence is only created once its scheduled day has actually arrived. So a rule you set up today for the 25th produces nothing until the 25th arrives and you next open the app. To fill in months that are already behind you, use Fill in past months below.

One consequence worth knowing: because the check runs at launch, an occurrence appears the next time you open Pocket Clear rather than at the exact moment it falls due, and simply switching back to the app when it was already running in the background does not trigger it.

Managing recurring items

• Your rules live in Settings > Recurring Transactions. The screen itself is titled Recurring, and it lists your rules in two sections: Active and Inactive.
• Tap a rule to open Edit Recurring, where you can change the amount, category and subcategory, frequency and its day, time of day, note, end date, and the Active switch — all of which apply to future occurrences.
• Turning Active off pauses a rule instead of deleting it. On Android you can tap an inactive rule to switch it back on. On iPhone, inactive rules don't open — the rows in the Inactive section aren't tappable, so once a rule is paused there the only thing left to do with it is swipe it away. Worth knowing before you pause one.
• To delete a rule, swipe it in the list — there is no delete button inside the edit sheet. Deleting stops future transactions from being created; already-logged transactions stay in your history untouched.
• Edit a single occurrence from the transaction list — this only changes that one entry, not the rule, and Pocket Clear will not overwrite your edit on a later run.

Fill in past months

If you set a rule up partway through the life of the thing it tracks — an EMI you are eighteen months into, a subscription you have had for two years — the months before today are simply missing. Fill in past months creates them in one go.

Open the rule from Settings > Recurring Transactions and tap Fill in past months at the bottom of the edit sheet. It only appears when you are editing an existing rule — you will not see it while creating one, because it works from the rule as saved.

The preview comes first

Nothing is written until you confirm. Pocket Clear works out every occurrence between the rule's start date and today, then shows you exactly what it found — for example, "This will create 18 transactions totalling $21,600.00, from Feb 14, 2025 to Jul 14, 2026." If that isn't what you expected, tap Cancel and nothing happens. If the rule has no past months to fill — it starts today, or you have already filled it — you get "There are no past months to fill in for this rule." instead.

When some months already look filled

Some of those months may already have a transaction you entered by hand. Pocket Clear spots these — same category, same amount, in the same period — and says so: "6 of those months already have a similar transaction in this category." You then choose:

• Skip those 6 — create only the months that look empty.
• Create all 18 — create everything, duplicates included. Useful when the existing entries are genuinely separate transactions that happen to match.

If every month in the plan looks like a duplicate, the Skip option is not offered — skipping all of them would create nothing at all, so the only meaningful choices are Create all or Cancel. The warning still tells you what Pocket Clear found, so you can back out.

Very old rules are filled in 120 at a time

One backfill creates at most 120 transactions. If a rule reaches back far enough to exceed that, the preview says so — "This rule has more past occurrences than one run can fill. Only the most recent 120 will be created — run this again afterwards to fill in more." — and it fills in the most recent 120 occurrences rather than the oldest. How far back that reaches depends on the schedule: 120 occurrences is ten years of a monthly rule, but a little over two years of a weekly one.

The 120 is a limit per run, not a lifetime limit on the rule. Tap Fill in past months again and Pocket Clear plans the next 120 — the occurrences it created the first time are already accounted for, so the second run picks up where the first stopped and never repeats a month. Each run shows you its own preview and count before it writes anything, so a very old rule is filled in a few reviewable passes rather than one enormous one.

Undo

As soon as the backfill finishes, Pocket Clear confirms how many transactions it created and offers Undo right there — an alert on iPhone, a snackbar on Android. Undo removes exactly the transactions that backfill created, and leaves anything that was already in those months alone.

Undo is one-way: read this before you use it

Once you undo a backfill, running it again on the same rule creates nothing. Pocket Clear remembers which occurrences a rule has already produced, and undoing does not make it forget them — so those months count as handled and the second attempt reports that there is nothing to fill in.

This is deliberate, and it is the same rule that stops Pocket Clear from resurrecting a generated transaction you deleted on purpose: once you have said no to a particular month, it stays gone. But it does mean Undo is best treated as a way out of a mistake rather than a preview you can toggle. If you undo and then change your mind, add those transactions by hand, or delete the rule and recreate it — a new rule counts as a fresh start and will backfill again.

Two things a backfill deliberately doesn't do

• It sends no notification. Automatic generation posts one; a backfill doesn't, since you are standing right there watching it happen and a batch of eighteen would be noise.
• It doesn't change when the rule next fires. Filling in the past leaves the forward schedule exactly where it was.

Backfilled transactions copy the rule's amount, type, category, subcategory, note and time of day, and they behave like any other transaction afterwards — they count in Reports and budgets for the months they land in, sync to your other devices, and can be edited or deleted individually.

Notifications

Each recurring rule has a Notify me when logged toggle, which is on by default. When Pocket Clear auto-creates a transaction for that rule, it posts a local notification titled "Recurring transaction logged" so you know it happened. If several occurrences of the same rule were due since your last visit, they are collapsed into one line with the total — for example, "Logged 3× monthly Rent · -$3,600.00". Two different rules firing at the same time produce two notifications, one each. You can turn this off per rule if you prefer to log without alerts, and the setting stays on the device you set it on rather than syncing.