Surprise-bill finder

Car registration, an annual membership, an insurance premium, a card’s annual fee. They come around once or twice a year and land on a month that wasn’t expecting them. The surprise-bill finder spots them in your own history and gives each one a bucket that fills a little every month, so the money is there when the bill arrives.

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Find your bills

On the Buckets tab, tap the Bills filter, then Find bills from your bank. The sheet has two parts: Tick the ones you want and tap Add at the bottom. Bills already in your budget aren’t suggested again.

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How the finder works

Copper reads up to two years of your budget’s transactions and looks for the same payee charging on a slow, steady rhythm: A bill needs to have come around at least twice to be listed. The exception is the usual suspects, like registration and memberships: one charge of $25 or more, from two to about thirteen months ago, is enough. Those are marked Looks yearly. Charges under $20, transfers and credit card payments are skipped, and so is anything that charges more often, like a monthly bill.

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What each suggestion shows

• The amount to set aside: the larger of the latest charge and the typical one, rounded up to whole dollars.
• Per month: that amount spread over the whole cycle. A $120 yearly renewal is$10.00 a month.
• Next due date, based on when it last charged.
• To be ready in time, highlighted, when the bill is due before a full cycle of saving. For example, if that $120 renewal is due in 3 months, you'd need$40.00 a month to have it covered.

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What adding one does

Each bill you add becomes a bill bucket on its own cycle (yearly, bi-annual or quarterly) with its next due date and target, in your Fixed Costs group. It also gets a Name contains rule for the payee, so when the charge arrives it lands in the right bucket and the bill rolls forward to next year. Put the bucket on a funding schedule and each run adds its share, spread over the runs left before the due date.