Subscriptions

If you want to learn about subscriptions please also check out:

• Tutorial: How to manage a subscription
• How to: manage your subscriptions

You can keep an eye on your expected recurring expenses by creating subscriptions. Things like rent and utilities must be paid every month and Firefly III can keep track of such things.

The idea of a subscription is that it represents a recurring subscription that comes back every week, month or year. Subscriptions don't automatically update your budgets, they aren't linked to those. You have to do that yourself.

Essentially a subscription is just a collection of withdrawals. You can't link income or transfers to subscriptions, only withdrawals. So, you can't use subscriptions to keep track of your salary or your savings account.

Subscriptions also have some properties like a basic repetition (every week, every 3 months) and a minimum and maximum amount. These properties are used to predict how much you should expect to spend on these subscriptions. On the frontpage, a little box will tell you how you're doing. It's possible to connect a subscription to a withdrawal more often than your repetition would predict. It's also possible to link transactions with more or less money than your minimum and maximum amounts.

What is the difference between a subscription and a recurring transaction?

Most users use recurring transactions when they do not import data into Firefly III. Because then, it may be useful to have Firefly III create transactions automatically.

If you import data using (for example) CSV files, this is not necessary. You can just import the data and link it to a subscription.

Personally, I link recurring transactions to subscriptions. You can see the option for it when you create a recurring transaction.