For anything you'd otherwise retype every week, month, or year — rent, a retainer invoice, a subscription bill, a standard month-end journal entry — you can post it once and have BareLedger create a fresh draft of it automatically on a schedule.

What can be made recurring

Four document types support it: Invoices, Bills, Journal Entries, and Expenses. Quotations, Sales Orders, Payments, Credit Notes, Debit Notes, and Vendor Credits don't have a recurring option — those are either pre-sale documents or things tied to a specific, already-happened event that shouldn't repeat on its own.

Step 1: Post the document once

A document has to be Posted before you can turn it into a schedule — you're telling the system "repeat exactly this," so it needs a finished, approved example to copy from.

Step 2: Set up the schedule

Open the posted document and click Make recurring. This button is available to whoever holds the ordinary "create/prepare" access for that module (Staff or Accountant, for invoices and bills; the same idea for journals and expenses) — it is not limited to preparers only, and it is not available to reviewers or approvers, whose role is checking, not scheduling.

Fill in:

  • Schedule name — a label to recognize it by later (e.g. "Monthly office rent").
  • Frequency — Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Yearly, with an interval (every 1, 2, 3… of that unit), and for Monthly/Yearly, which day it should land on — a specific day of the month, the last day of the month (handy for month-end accruals), or, for Yearly, a specific month and day.
  • Starts on and, optionally, Ends on — leave the end date blank for a schedule that runs indefinitely.
  • Time of day and Timezone the occurrence should be generated at.
  • Branch, if your company tracks separate branches.
  • Due after (days) — invoices and bills only: how many days after generation the due date should be set.

Click Create schedule. You'll see a confirmation explaining the cadence, and a reminder that this can be paused or deleted later.

What happens on each occurrence

Every occurrence a schedule generates is saved as a draft — it is never posted automatically. It still has to go through your normal Submit → Review → Approve steps, exactly like one you typed by hand. Recurring only saves you the retyping, not the checking.

If a schedule fails to generate on time (for example, an account it depended on was deactivated), the schedule's owner gets a notification under the Recurring transactions notification category so they can fix it.

Step 3: Manage your schedules

Go to Recurring Transactions in the sidebar to see every schedule across invoices, bills, journals, and expenses in one list, with its status:

  • Active — running normally.
  • Paused — temporarily stopped; nothing generates until you resume it.
  • Needs attention — a specific occurrence landed on an ambiguous daylight-saving-time date (for example, a time that technically happens twice, or not at all, when clocks change) and needs you to manually resolve which day it should count as.
  • Completed — passed its end date; nothing more will generate.

Each schedule has: Pause/Resume, Edit schedule (change the frequency, dates, or amount going forward), and Delete. If a schedule has already generated at least one document, deleting it pauses it instead — the schedule's history and the documents it already created are kept either way; only a schedule that has never generated anything can be removed outright.

Common mix-ups

  • Expecting a generated occurrence to already be posted — it always starts as a draft and needs the same review/approval as anything else.
  • Trying to make a quotation, sales order, or payment recurring — there's no recurring option for those document types.
  • Assuming only the person who created the original document can set up its schedule — anyone with ordinary create access for that module can click Make recurring on any posted document of that type, including an Accountant who wasn't the original preparer.