How to add recurring expenses

How to avoid manually adding expenses like rent, savings, etc.

We might not like it, but most of us have recurring expenses, usually on a monthly cadence. These can be rent, a gym membership, school, or, if you're intentional about your finances, savings.

NOTE: A couple of weeks after writing this and getting some requests to make this easier, recurring expenses are now natively supported in Budget Zen! You just need to edit an expense and mark it as recurring, so that it's copied with the budgets for the following month, automatically, and securely, without any coding required!

The article below will remain as it was, for historical purposes.

Budget Zen's end-to-end encrypted nature doesn't allow the server to automatically create recurring expenses, so the only way to do it is to leverage browser automation tools, and I have created an example using Cypress exactly for this.

While this does require installing and running some tools in your computer (most notably node), it ensures no data ever leaves your computer/browser unencrypted.

You can find instructions to install the Budget Zen Automations in the GitHub repository.

The two sample expenses should be enough to give you a way to simply copy + paste any other recurring expenses you want, and then you just need to simply run npm test or npm start (depending on if you want to see the browser automation or not) on the first day of the month, to get those expenses in, automatically.

While it's not as practical as simply marking an expense as recurring (something I plan on doing in the future, to avoid this need), it's better than the previous method, which wasn't end-to-end encrypted and required an API call per expense.