Know when a monthly bill never made it into your books

Every owner with a handful of monthly subscriptions knows this one. The bills hit the card, the receipts land in some inbox, and you mean to file them. Then it's tax season and you're digging through old email for last July's receipt, trying to remember whether last July even had one.

The trouble with a pile of receipts is that it can only tell you what's in it. It can't tell you what isn't. Eleven months of a bill, neatly filed, looks exactly as finished as twelve.

So I gave the back office I run Forecheck on a list of the bills it should expect, and now it speaks up when one doesn't arrive.

What I see

Each bill on the list has a name and the day of the month it usually shows up. If a week goes by after that day with no receipt, the bill counts as missing, and the overview page says so: how many are missing, then each one by name and month. Tap the line and it takes you to the list. When nothing is missing, the line isn't there, so there's nothing to read past.

On the receipts page, the missing ones sit at the top, always in view. Below that is every bill by month, back to the month I started tracking it, so an old gap can't age out of view. On a phone that full grid folds away until I ask for it.

The rules it follows

A check like this is only useful if it's rarely wrong, because the first few false alarms teach you to ignore it. So a receipt has to actually be the bill:

• The date can drift. A receipt counts for a month if the vendor matches and the date is within 10 days of the usual day. A bill that runs a few days late doesn't set anything off.
• Top-ups aren't bills. Some services charge a small automatic recharge between invoices. A bill can require a minimum amount or a certain invoice number, so a recharge never passes for the month's bill.
• Two accounts, two bills. If you have two accounts with the same company, each one is tracked on its own, so one account's receipt can't cover for the other's.
• Duplicates don't count twice. If I save the same receipt again, it clears itself only when the vendor and the total both match the original. If they don't, it stays in front of me to look at.
• Nothing is expected before it started. A new bill begins in the month I say it does, and earlier months stay blank.

When the answer is no

Sometimes a missing receipt is simply gone, or that month really had no charge. So every missing month has a "No bill this month" button. It stops asking about that month, and it can be undone if I find the receipt later.

Subscriptions change, too. When I cancel something, I stop the bill from that month on, and the older months stay exactly as they were. When I sign up for something new, I add it with its name and its usual day. If I come back to a service, I resume it.

Why it's built this way

I didn't want another system to feed. I already have the one habit that matters: when a receipt shows up, I save the PDF to a folder, and it's in the back office by the next morning. If it's something I haven't told the system how to handle, it still comes in, and it waits for me to say where it goes.

The list just watches that habit and tells me when it slips. It's a small tool, and it's shaped to how I actually work, which is the whole idea. Stop bending your business to fit the software.

If there's a chore like this one eating your month, tell me about it.