---
title: "Recurring Transactions"
description: "Schedule invoices, bills, expenses and journals that repeat weekly, monthly or yearly. Each one is still reviewed and approved before it posts."
url: "https://bareledger.app/guides/recurring"
category: "Sales & customers"
updated: "2026-10-29"
publisher: "BareLedger (Syneria Technologies OPC)"
---

# Recurring Transactions

> Put invoices, bills, journals, and expenses that repeat on a schedule, without giving up the checks.

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.