Set up costs that repeat by themselves

Introduction

Some vehicle costs come back every month, quarter or year: a lease instalment, a tracker subscription, road tax. You enter each one once on the screen headed Planned Cost, with Register your recurring costs below. underneath, and the app adds the cost line for you each time it falls due. The screen is a single list with a New button above it and, at the end of every row, a pencil icon (open) and a trash-can icon (remove). The lines the app adds land on the Cost overview screen, where Cost Origin tells them apart from costs typed in by hand.

You come here when:

• a new van arrives on a lease and the monthly instalment should be booked for three years;
• the yearly road tax should sit in your cost figures without anyone remembering it;
• a subscription has ended and the app should stop adding it;
• a line on Cost overview was typed by nobody and you want to know where it came from;
• the month's cost figures look short and the automatic lines may be missing.

Words these screens use

Skim this once:

Every way to reach this

Use this page for costs the app adds by itself. For a one-off repair bill, see Record what a vehicle costs you.

How to use

Configuration

There is no switch to turn the automatic run on for your company; it is already running. Once a day — the schedule is set for 15:00 — the app adds the write-downs that are due for your vehicles and the lines for every planned cost whose Next execution date has arrived. Nobody presses a button for this and no screen shows when it last ran. What you control is which planned costs exist and whether each one has Auto generate set to Yes; that is all on the Cost planner screen below.

Before you start: you need a company administrator account. The Financials screen, the Cost planner and Cost overview screens, and saving a planned cost are all limited to administrators. If Financials is not in your main menu, that is why; ask your administrator. The vehicle must already exist in the fleet, and if you want the line filed under a cost category, the category must already exist too (see Record what a vehicle costs you).

Using the cost planner

From the main menu open Financials, go down to the Costs heading and click Cost planner. The screen headed Planned Cost opens.

1. Click New, above the list, or the pencil icon on an existing row. A popup headed Edit Planned Cost opens.

2. Fill in the popup, top to bottom:

   Field	Starts as	What it does	What it accepts
   Frequency	Monthly	How often a line is added. One-time adds one line, then switches itself off	One-time, Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly
   Auto generate	Yes	No keeps the planned cost but stops new lines	Yes or No
   Amount	0	The amount of each line	Amounts with decimals
   Description	Empty	Copied onto every line, so you can recognise it later	Text, up to 200 characters
   Start date	One month from today	Nothing is added before this date	A date; required
   End date	Three years from today	Nothing is added after this date	A date; required
   Next execution date	One month from today	The date the next line is added — the field that actually decides when	A date
   Cost category	Empty	The category every line is filed under	Pick from your categories
   Cost sub category	Empty	Kept on the planned cost only; it is not copied onto the lines	Pick from the chosen category's subcategories
   Asset	Empty	The vehicle the cost belongs to, chosen by registration number	Pick from your fleet

3. Click Save. Cancel throws your changes away. Saving adds no cost line straight away; the first appears at the first daily run on or after Next execution date.

To pause a planned cost, open it, set Auto generate to No and click Save. To stop it for good, remove it with the trash-can icon at the end of its row.

To see where a cost line came from, open Cost overview (the tile beside Cost planner) and look at Cost Origin; the drop-down above that column filters on it:

A Planned line does not say which planned cost made it. Open it with its pencil icon and match its Description against the Description column on Cost planner.

Key details

How the dates move. Each daily run looks for planned costs where all four of these are true:

For each, it adds one line dated the day of the run, then moves Next execution date on by one month (Monthly), three months (Quarterly) or one year (Yearly). A One-time cost is switched to No instead. Changing Start date does not move Next execution date; change both.

Worked example. A tracker for van 12-VKL-3 costs €29.50 a month. You set Frequency to Monthly, Amount to 29.50, Start date to 1 November 2026, End date to 31 October 2028 and Next execution date to 1 November 2026. On 1 November a €29.50 Planned line appears on Cost overview and Next execution date becomes 1 December. Over the two years that is 24 lines, €708 in total. After that the next date passes the end date, and the planned cost stays in the list adding nothing.

Missed months are caught up one day at a time, one line per daily run. Pause the example in November and switch Auto generate back on on 10 February 2027: Next execution date is still 1 December 2026, so the December, January and February lines arrive on 10, 11 and 12 February, each dated the day it was added. To skip the paused months, move Next execution date forward before switching back on.

End-of-month dates drift. A monthly cost due on 31 January moves to 28 February and stays on the 28th from then on. Pick the 28th or earlier if the day matters.

What each line carries. The vehicle, Amount, Description and Cost category — not the subcategory, and no supplier. Editing a planned cost changes only the lines still to come: raise Amount from €29.50 to €32.00 and the lines already added stay at €29.50.

The write-downs run at the same time, shown as Depreciation. How that amount is worked out, and how to switch it off for a vehicle, is on Record a vehicle's purchase price and depreciation.

What to do next: the day after a Next execution date, filter Cost overview on Planned and check the line arrived with the right amount.

Q&A

The Next execution date has passed and no Planned line appeared on Cost overview. Check the four conditions in the table under Key details on the Cost planner row. The usual causes are Auto generate set to No, a Start date still in the future, or an End date that has passed. A planned cost with an empty Next execution date is never added at all; fill the date in and click Save. If all four conditions are met and nothing arrived after the next day's run, the automatic run itself failed — see the question about the error log below.

Three or four identical Planned lines appeared on consecutive days. The planned cost was catching up months it had missed, because its Next execution date was in the past — usually after Auto generate was switched back on, or after a planned cost was entered with an old date. If the lines are not wanted, delete them on Cost overview with the trash-can icon at the end of each row, and check that Next execution date on Cost planner is now in the future.

A Planned line has no subcategory, although the planned cost has one. The subcategory is never copied onto the line. Open the line with its pencil icon on Cost overview, choose the Cost sub category there and click Save. You need to do this for every line; changing the planned cost does not fill it in.

A One-time cost was added and now shows Auto generate No. That is how a one-time cost works: it switches itself off after its single line. To add it again, set Auto generate back to Yes and set Next execution date to the date you want.

I deleted a planned cost. Are its lines gone too? No. Removing a planned cost with the trash-can icon on Cost planner only stops future lines. Every line already added stays on Cost overview, marked Planned, and has to be deleted there if it is wrong.

Where is the cost error log? There is no screen for it. When the daily run fails, the app writes the failure to the technical log on the server, with the message Error in generating planned costs. or Error in generating depreciation costs., and shows nothing in the app. The Logs item under Admin in the main menu is a record of changes to other records and does not contain these messages. If planned or write-down lines are missing and the checks above do not explain it, ask RentVisie support to look up those messages for the date in question. A failure in the write-downs does not stop the planned costs, and the other way round.

A line appeared one day later than the Next execution date. The run happens once a day at a fixed time. A Next execution date that includes a later time of day — which happens when you keep the date the app filled in on New — is picked up by the next day's run. Choosing the date yourself in the date picker avoids this.

Related pages. Record what a vehicle costs you for typing in one-off costs, cost categories and suppliers; Record a vehicle's purchase price and depreciation for the monthly write-down amounts.