Let us say that you signed up for a business internet connection last month and paid the first month's subscription by credit card. One way of entering each month's transaction is to wait for the bill to arrive, make the payment, and then enter into GnuCash by hand. However, there is a better way. This will not only save you a lot of time but GnuCash will also pop up a timely reminder, in case there are penalties for late payment.
You took one transaction that you created and not only made it repetitive, but also set it on a timeline so that it comes up at the appropriate time. By setting up this scheduled transaction in GnuCash, you dropped two mangoes with one stone (we prefer this metaphor to the more popular, but less animal-friendly one. Feel free to swap the mango with another fruit depending on the type of tree you used to throw stones at in your childhood):
SX is an abbreviation for Scheduled Transaction. You may see this abbreviation used in some GnuCash documentation and messages.
As you have seen, it is pretty easy to take any existing transaction and make it into a scheduled transaction. If you know the number of transactions, then you can set the number of occurrences. If, on the other hand, you know the date when a transaction will end, you can set the end date instead.
Start and end dates
In the Make Scheduled Transaction dialog, even though there are fields marked Start Date and End Date, you can't enter any value there. If you would like to enter any of these dates, click on the Advanced… button and open the Edit Scheduled Transaction window. You can enter Start Date in the Frequency tab and Repeats Until in the Occurrences pane in the Overview tab.
Setting up a scheduled transaction is the first step of the process. You have asked GnuCash to remind you seven days in advance about the next payment. GnuCash will remind you when you start GnuCash when that seventh day reminder period comes up. In the next tutorial, we will see what your options are when that reminder appears on the screen.
a. Select Frequency Daily and Every 15 days.
b. Select Frequency Semi-Monthly.
c. Select Frequency Weekly and Every 2 weeks.
d. Select Frequency Twice-a-month.