Tools · Regulars
See what you pay for again and again.
Choose a year of bank statements you have checked in Tables. Regulars shows one list of every payee you pay repeatedly, sorted by what they cost you in a year. Ordinary code does the work, and the same statements always give the same list. The whole route, from statement PDFs to the list, is the playbook A year of statements.
The page from the app, on prepared samples. It is ordinary code, so it runs for real. It cannot open a file of yours, and it needs JavaScript.
Why this exists
Some banking apps show your spending by merchant. Many high-street banks show only categories. I ran an earlier version over a year of my own bank statements, and the yearly totals were the part my bank did not give me: direct debits, subscriptions and habits such as coffee, all in one list.
What goes in and what comes out
- Goes in
- The CSV files Tables saves from your PDF statements, after you have checked them. About twelve files make a year. Choose them together or add more later.
- A line
- A payee you paid 3 or more times in 3 or more calendar months. Only money paid out is listed.
- Each line shows
- How often you pay, such as “monthly” or “about 3 times a week”, the typical payment, the yearly total, any price changes with their dates, and when you last paid if that was a while ago.
- You can
- Open a line to see the payments behind it, rename it, merge two lines the bank names differently, or split one out again. The bank’s own names stay visible.
- New in the latest statement
- Every name you paid for the first time in your latest statement, largest first. “First time” means not in the earlier statements you chose. It is a list of what is new, with no view on whether a payment should be there.
- Comes out
- The list as CSV, and if you want, every payment behind it and what is new.
Payees are grouped by general rules, such as dropping reference numbers and the town after a card payment. There is no list of merchants. There are no categories, no “subscription” or “waste” labels and no advice on cutting back. It tells you what you pay; what to do about it is up to you.
Regulars also checks each statement’s running balance and shows any row where it does not add up, so you can fix that row in Tables. Files covering the same dates are pointed out, because a payment in both would count twice.
Models used
None. Regulars is ordinary code: every name, date and amount it shows comes from your statements, and every total is plain arithmetic on them. It downloads nothing and sends nothing over the network.
What has been checked
Automated tests run on a year of invented statements, including with the network switched off.
On twelve of my own statements, every running balance added up and the list needed no manual merges. Each of the last three had 22 to 25 names I had paid for the first time, most of them under £20. The list shows them all. I have not yet checked every price change and “last paid” it reports against my own records. That is one person’s year from one bank.
Known limits
- It only knows the column layout of one bank’s statements so far. Another bank needs a small addition before it will work.
- It is only as right as the statements you checked in Tables.
- Nothing is stored. Your statements, renames and merges are gone when you close the window, so save the CSV to keep your list.
- A payee with fewer than 3 payments in 3 months cannot be merged into a line, unless it is new in the latest statement.
Availability
Not available to download yet. Regulars runs in the development Kettle app on my Mac, beside Tables. There is no public installer or source download at present.