Pay Bills

One of the big things I want the app to do is help me pay bills. This means that for each pay period, I log into the app, it tells me what bills I need to pay, provides me with links to pay the bills I need to pay, and helps me track what I've paid over time.

Complications

• I've been experimenting with the best way to do this in Google Sheets and in R (e.g., bills_due.R and data_01_create_bill_pay_df.qmd). However, it's proven to be slightly more complicated than I expected. Why?
  • Perhaps I've been trying to do too many things so far.
  • I want to align bill due dates with the pay period I will pay them in.
    • Secondarily, I want to be able to look back in time and see what I paid in previous years and pay periods.
  • I might need to pay bills once a month, once a year, or as needed (e.g., Travel credit card).
  • Additionally, I don't always choose to pay a bill during the pay period it is due. For example, car insurance might be due on the 16th (second pay period), but I might choose to pay it when I make my first pay period payments. Why? Sometimes I do this to more evenly distribute the amount of money I'm paying from each paycheck.
    • This might be less of an issue now than it used to be for multiple reasons.
    • I have a variable I can use for filtering that contains the bill's actual due date (account_date_monthly_payment_due).
    • I have a variable I can use for filtering that contains the pay period I want to pay the bill in (account_pay_period_manual).
    • I need to figure out how to best use a combination of these variables to display the bills I want to pay in a given pay period.

Plan for moving forward

• IF I select pay period 1, THEN show bills that are due 1-15 (account_date_monthly_payment_due) or "First" (account_pay_period_manual). It seems like account_pay_period_manual should probably be given preference.
• IF I select pay period 2, THEN show bills that are due 16-EOM (account_date_monthly_payment_due) or "Second" (account_pay_period_manual). It seems like account_pay_period_manual should probably be given preference.

Annual bills

This seems to complicate things a little bit because I don't think I've figured out how I want to view/interact with my annual bills.

• Currently, my annual bills are displayed on each month's sheeting in my Google Sheets budget. However, I don't really interact with them except for in the months that they are due.
• Option 1: See my annual bills on the bill pay interface always, no matter what I've selected for month and pay period.
• Option 2: Keep annual bills on a separate view/tab. Create some other reminder system to pay them.
• Option 3: Annual bills show up in the year-month-pay period that they are due.
• Option 4: Some combination of 2 and 3. They show up in the year-month-pay period that they are due and there is a tab to view all annual and semi-annual bills in aggregate.

Other potential plans for moving forward

• Accounts table:
  • Just have a cycle column. Annual, monthly, biweekly, and variable.
  • Create a new pay period table that Accounts will join with. Why? Because the pay period I want to pay a given bill in can change over time.