If you want to get a grip on money management and get your finances under control, our Reminders and Recurring Transactions tool can help you with that. In its most basic form, the Reminders and Recurring Transactions tool will show you what days you have to pay bills or remember to do other important things. From there, you can set it to email you a reminder, have it recur several times and associate transactions with it. This mini-tutorial will give you an overview of the Reminders and Recurring Transactions Tool.

To get to the reminders and recurring transactions tool, click on the Tools item in the navigation menu. Next, click on the Reminders and Recurring Transactions link in the list below. When the page loads, you’ll be presented with a calendar for the current and next months, as well as list of any upcoming reminders you may have. If you don’t have any reminders added to the site, you’ll see a form to add a new one.

The reminder calendars will show what days you have reminders set to occur and how many are set to happen on that date. If you click on the date in the calendar that has a reminder occurring on it, the list on the right will re-populate with that reminder and all upcoming reminders up to 30 days after the date you selected. If you click on a date without a reminder occurring, it will display the Add Reminder form on the right pre-populated with the date you clicked on. You can move forward and backward in time in the calendar by clicking the “<<” or “>>” links above the calendar.

Adding a new reminder is very easy. If you don’t see the add reminder form already, there is a link above your list of upcoming reminders to display the add reminder form. When you’re adding a new reminder, you give it a title/description so you know what the reminder actually is.

Next, you can select if it’s a one time reminder or if you want it to repeat over a time period. If you want it to repeat over set durations, click the Repeating option. This will bring up an “End Date” input that lets you select when the reminder ends. Next, you select if it repeats every x days, weeks, months or years. For example, if you get paid every other Friday, you would set your Start Date to the date of your next pay check and then set it to repeat every 2 weeks.

If you want more flexibility over how the reminder will repeat, you can select the Repeating (Floating) option. This is a little more dynamic and lets you set reminders for time periods such as “Every Second Tuesday” or “The First Day” of the month.

After deciding how the reminder occurs, you have the options to add a transaction to it and an option to email you. Adding a transaction to the reminder lets you easily schedule payments that may be automatically deducted from your bank account or pay checks that come in. If you select the Add Transaction option, you’ll see a typical Add Transaction form like you would when adding a normal transaction to the site. Simply fill out the details and the transaction will be posted on the day the reminder is set to occur.

If you select the Email Me option, you can tell ClearCheckbook to send you an email reminder up to a week in advance of the reminder occurring. This is great if you need to know a few days ahead of time so you can write a check and mail it before a bill is due.

After adding the reminder, the calendars on the left will update and you can see your reminder if it falls within the current or next month. If you need to edit your reminder, you can find it in the list and click on the name of the reminder. This will bring up a form that lets you edit any of the options. Deleting a single occurrence or the entire reminder can also be done by clicking the appropriate link in the list of reminders.

If you have a transaction associated with a reminder, the reminder list will show the amount next to the reminder name. There is also a Post Now link that if pressed, will automatically add the transaction at that time, rather than when the reminder is set to occur. This is helpful if you pay a bill early and want it to show up in your register immediately.

In addition to going to the Reminders and Recurring transactions page, you can also add it as a gadget to your Dashboard page. This will show the calendar and any upcoming reminders.

The Reminders and Recurring Transactions tool is a great tool for money management. By scheduling all of your upcoming bills and alerting yourself of them, you’ll be less likely to forget a payment. The Reminders and Recurring Transactions tool also ties into our Estimated Future Balances feature so you can project your balances to a future date.

This will be the first in a series of blog posts about how you can use ClearCheckbook’s features to help you with money management. In this post we’ll be covering the transaction register and how to get the most out of it.

The ClearCheckbook Transaction Register in its most basic form is just a web-based version of your traditional checkbook register. When you add transactions to the site, they show up in your register sorted by the date of the transaction. If you want to sort the register by any of the other columns, simply click on the column header to sort it. You can also set the register to view a specific account, or an overview of all your accounts combined together.

The real power of ClearCheckbook revolves around marking your transactions as “Jived.” This is our term for transactions that have cleared with your bank statement. To “jive” a transaction, you just click the check mark next to the amount of the transaction that’s cleared with your bank. If done correctly, your “Jived” balance for an account should match exactly what your bank statement says. If these numbers don’t match, then you know there is a discrepancy between your ClearCheckbook account and your bank statement. (As a side note here’s an excellent tutorial put together by one of our members about how to jive your transactions: https://www.clearcheckbook.com/help/tutorial#jive)

You can also easily edit and delete transactions from this page. Editing a transaction is as easy as clicking on it and changing the details of the transaction. To delete one or more transactions, simply click the check box next to the transaction(s) you want to delete, then click the “Delete” button at the top or bottom of the register.

Money management isn’t just about knowing how much money your bank thinks you have, it’s also about knowing how much money you do have. Banks aren’t aware when you write checks and often times stores only send $1.00 pending charges when you pay with a credit or debit card until the transaction fully clears. If you simply trust what your bank says your balance is, you could be greatly overestimating how much money you are actually able to spend.

This is why adding all of your transactions to the register is very important. As soon as you write a check or go buy gas for your car, you enter that transaction into the site. The Overall Balance tells you how much money you actually have in your account. It’s essentially what your bank statement says, plus any outstanding transactions your bank doesn’t know about yet.

Here’s an example of how keeping your transactions up to date in your register could really help you from bouncing a check or overdrawing your account. Lets say you have $500 in your account today. You write a check of $200 for utilities, go buy some gas and groceries and then go see a movie with friends. That could easily add up to another $200 of expenses. Some of those stores, like the gas station, will post a $1 pending transaction to your account instead of the $40 or so it really cost.

Now, a few days later some friends ask if you want to go travel out of town for the weekend. You look at your bank’s website and see you still have a few hundred dollars in your account (because the check hasn’t cleared and those pending transactions don’t reflect the actual cost of the transaction). Now, when go to and get a hotel room or chip in for gas, you could easily dip into a negative balance.

Someone who entered those transactions into their ClearCheckbook register would have known exactly how much money they had to spend (which would have been around $100 instead of $350-$450 their bank might have told them.) They would have been able to make better decisions about what they purchase and prevented themselves from overdrawing their account.

The above example is compounded even more when you throw credit cards into the mix. If you diligently enter your credit card purchases into your transaction register, you’ll know whether or not you can afford to pay your bill off at the end of the month by looking at your overall balance.

Money management isn’t just about setting budgets or putting money into a savings account. It starts by simply knowing where your money is being spent and how much you have at any given time. By taking a few minutes to enter your purchases into ClearCheckbook and knowing how much money you truly have, you can save yourself a lot of money in overdraft fees.

The upcoming posts in this series will cover how to use the transactions from the register to view spending reports, set budgets, pay bills and more all in the effort to give you true power over money management.