Some companies annoyingly setup direct debits monthly over 10 months instead of regular frequencies (true monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc) without an option for alternative setup. Water companies are notorious for this. My water company insists on direct debits for April to January. Then I pay nothing in Feb & March. This messes up my committed spend predictions in Feb & March.
In the subscription settings for my water bill payments I’d like to be able to tell Emma that payments are not taken in February & March as a persistent setting.
Alternatively, I’d like to be able to suspend subscriptions for a fixed period as a temporary setting. For example, in January I could tell Emma that the subscription is now suspended until April. This would not be my preferred solution for this problem but might have wider application (e.g. could also be used when taking fixed payment holidays on any subscriptions).
I know at the moment I can manually mark a subscription as inactive and then manually reactivate it at a later date. But the problem is I have to remember to reactive it.
I just experienced this problem myself for the council tax. The way I’m solving is just by changing the next predicted payment date to a couple of months from now.
What would be the benefit of doing anything else other than this?
Doing what you’re doing means we have to remember to reactivate it toward the end March.
What I’m suggesting is you build some automation (ability to inactivate certain months as a persistent setting or ability to inactivate for X future months as an ad-hoc setting). The former option may be a bit niche (perhaps only relevant to this situation) but the later may also be useful in other situations (e.g. taking a temporary but defined period break from a subscription service).
I don’t understand why there is a need to mark it as inactive in the first place. In my case, I’ve left it active, only changed the prediction date, so the bill won’t mess with my budget for the next couple months but still stays in the “active” section (which is factually correct as this is still an active contract I can expect to pay at some point)
I misread your first post and I didn’t think about using the “edit the prediction” option actually. That basically does the job, thanks. Just need to remember to edit the prediction in January but that’s less of an issue.
I suppose I would then ask what’s the point of having both “This is not a subscription” and “This is inactive” as options for managing subscriptions. What circumstances are “this is inactive” designed for?
This is inactive = this was a bill/subscription and I’ve cancelled it, so won’t expect more payments.
This is not a subscription = this shouldn’t be in this list because it’s not even a recurring thing (we categorised it wrong or the user added it in error)
Is there any benefit to me as a user in doing this instead of just marking cancelled subscriptions as “this is not a subscription”? At this point I have a very long list of things in my inactive list and don’t know if there’s any benefit in having them there.
Actually there is an advantage in having them “inactive” but still a subscription other than archive. If that merchant charges you again, you’ll get a notification (like the ones you get for any recurring transaction)
@antonio coming back to this as it’s the time of year at which this becomes an issue again. Although the edit the prediction option does the job it is a bit annoying having to remember to manually edit at the appropriate time. It’s easily forgotten.
I still feel it would be helpful if we could mark in advance certain months to exclude from a monthly direct debit prediction (i.e. on the screen where you choose the frequency it would be useful to have an option to exclude certain months/dates).