Help with a recurring payment creation rule please

[Nebarik]

If anyone has worked out how to do this I'd love to see a working example of how to do this. The rule syntax breaks my brain. Ive got some basic ones like renaming entities and setting tags (after much effort and trial and error), but I look at the wiki for this one and my mind just goes "nope".

I've got a Buy Now Pay Later account 'Afterpay'. Buying something on that card splits up repayments into 4ths, starting on the next Saturday (or same day if purchased on Saturday) and then every 2 weeks thereafter.

My pseudo code for this would be something like:

if
account_name == "Afterpay" and is_expense
then...

create transation is_recurring == True
is_income == True
amount == ($amount/4)
date on date.day next Saturday for interval 2 weeks for 4 times

Hopefully this is even possible in the current version of WYGIWYH.

[eitchtee]

Hey friend,

The better option would be to use an installment plan, starting on the first Saturday and then repeating every 2 weeks, but very interesting use case nonetheless, it's definitely possible in the current version of the rules engine (can't say this didn't make me a bit proud), with some caveats:

• You'll have to delete the originating transaction yourself, i.e. you create a single transaction, the rule engine creates the 4 transactions, then you delete the one you created yourself.
• For amounts that do not evenly split into 4s, you'll loose some cents eventually. For this to work you'd need to setup a algorithm to carry over the remainder into the first or the last transaction depending on how your bank does it, I'm pretty sure this is possible as a python one liner, but I didn't bother too much with maths this late in the night, maybe you could ask some IA to help*.
• The way it's currently setup, your transaction HAS to have a description tied to it, otherwise you risk overwriting existing transactions if they happen on the same day. There are ways around this, but depends on how you setup your transactions.

---

Now, about setup. We really need a better way to share these, but for the time being here's some screenshots, if something isn't clear let me know.

1. Create the rule

2. You'll need 4 Update or create transaction action, one for each transaction we're creating

3. Update or create transaction 1

4. Update or create transaction 2

5. Update or create transaction 3 and 4 are the same thing as number 2 (above), you only need to change:

• relativedelta(weeks=2) to relativedelta(weeks=4) and relativedelta(weeks=6), respectively
• (2/4) with (3/4) and (4/4) in the descriptions respectively

This should get you going, there's of course improvements that could be made.

Rules aren't the easiest thing in the world, as we're trading ease of use for flexibility, which allows us to do these kind of things, but in the end, they're just a limited subset of python; if you feed the wiki page into an LLM, it'll get you 90% of the way there.

LMK how it goes, hope you're enjoying WYGIWYH.

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* Ask for a python one liner that divides "amount" into 4 + the remainder and set it as the amount in one of the actions

[Nebarik]

Thanks heaps. Super helpful.
I did start with trying to make installments but the recurrance options in the UI didnt look flexible enough for fortnightly and did my head in a bit.

I found a small bug when following your steps. (I prefer to make transfers muted) In the Set Values section setting Mute to True doesnt seem to do anything:

I ended up making a second sequenced rule to mute the new ones automatically and the test button shows it working correctly. In reality it doesnt actually set them to mute (both on create or update). No big deal, i can easily manually click them all over to mute in a few seconds. figured its just a early software bug.

And yeah WYGIWYH is great (random bugs and complex rule creations aside). I've tried so many over the years and i hated how required the 'budget' aspect is in all of them. I just wanna see fancy graphs showing where my money is flowing from and to.

Regarding rules;
This probably isnt the best place to suggest this but I reckon a good usability feature would be to have it ship with some default disabled example rules instead of hiding them in the wiki so people can use one as a starting point.

And if it's not too hard. A clicky way to make one from the transactions view. Like if you click a transaction's '...' button and theres a option for 'Make rule', which brings you to the new rule screen with that transaction's details prefilled into the "If" section. eg: account_name == "example account" and entities_name == "example entity" and is_expense. Then they could quickly add some actions. The If section is the hardest part, the actions are a lot easier for the python-challenged like me.