The idea
You tell $pend about every bill you can see coming. It works out what each month looks like, and you check bills off as you pay them. Everything else in the app — the projections, the totals, the cash-flow plan — is built from those two things.
Adding bills
On the Bills tab, tap +. Pick a common bill to pre-fill it, or start blank. Press and hold any bill to edit it; swipe to delete.
Every bill needs a payee, an amount, and a frequency:
- Weekly
- A day of the week. Gives you four or five occurrences a month, each checked off separately.
- Monthly
- A day of the month. Short months clamp — the 31st becomes the 28th in February.
- Quarterly
- A starting month, then every three months.
- Annual
- A month and day.
- Multi-Year
- Things like passports or licences — a date, a starting year, and how many years apart.
- Disbursed
- A one-off bill paid in instalments, with uneven amounts and irregular dates. It archives itself when the last instalment is paid.
- Variable
- Irregular spend like tolls or an EZ-Pass top-up. You give an estimated monthly amount and a settlement day, then log the real charges as they happen.
Exact and estimated
Every amount is flagged one or the other. Estimated amounts show a tilde: ~$150.00. Any total that includes an estimate is itself an estimate, so it carries the tilde too. It's there so you always know which figures are solid.
Credit cards
Mark a bill as a credit card and give it your typical monthly statement as an estimate. Then nest other bills under it:
- Monthly items (streaming, gym) are shown for memory but add nothing — your statement estimate already covers them.
- Non-monthly items (an annual insurance charge) are added in the month they land, because that month's statement really will be bigger.
- Variable items on the card behave like monthly ones: shown, but already covered.
When you pay the card, enter the real statement total. That single figure already contains everything on the card, including one-off spending you never itemised — which is how $pend captures ad-hoc card spend without making you track receipts.
Checking bills off
Tap the circle next to a bill and enter what you actually paid — not what you expected to. That recorded amount is what every past figure in the app is built from.
Mistapped? Uncheck it. Re-checking asks for the amount again rather than quietly restoring the old one.
Paying late
A bill paid late counts toward the month it was due, not the month you paid it. March's rent paid on 3 April is still March's rent — otherwise April would look artificially expensive and March artificially cheap.
Overdue bills
Anything unpaid past its due date moves to Past Due. Bills left over from earlier months are listed separately, tagged with the month they were due, and shown as their own red total — they're deliberately kept out of this month's figures, because each was already counted in its own month.
Editing a bill's amount
Edits apply going forward only. Put your rent up and future months change; the months you've already paid keep the figures you actually paid. The past never moves.
Deleting a bill
Deleting stops a bill projecting into the future but keeps its payment history, so past months stay accurate.
Syncing
If you're signed in to iCloud, $pend syncs across your Apple devices through your own private iCloud — no account, no login. If you're not signed in, everything stays on the device and works exactly the same.