Question

I am trying to track my subscription amt on a monthly basis for my expenses in Notion.

Q1: Do you guys key in every single month for say, Netflix as the title , when they are due for renewal? Or is there smarter way to do this? It seems very silly to type Netflix every month in the title field for this.

Q2:If you automate things in Q1 as recurring bills, how do you manage to extract the figure for each month and put them in your monthly reports?
I have looked up some tutorials and would like to expand on this question based on the structure that was proposed.

Eg.
Service Name [title]
Amt [#]
Billing [Selection - Yearly, Monthly]
Category [linked to category database ]
Renewal Date [ Date property]
Next Renewal [Formulated]
Monthly Cost [Formulated]

Thank you.

Answer 1

If you need it like that, create an automation with a template in your Notion database to create a new entry with a recurring basis.

You can select the title, billing, date, cost and so on. after creating the template edit it again and select the recurring you need, in this case each month.

Other attempts is to create an automation using a block button, where you add an item to the database with a click and it can have all the info as needed.

Another one is to have just 1 item in your database, use formulas to calculate the next month and use filters to show items only in this week for example.

The 3 ways work and it depends how you need the information and data, if it is just a reminder or if you actually need to have the item as an expense for example.

Answer 2

Q1: Don't retype it. Keep two databases.

• Subscriptions: Service, Amount, Billing (Monthly/Yearly), Renewal date, plus a formula Monthly cost: if(prop("Billing") == "Yearly", prop("Amount") / 12, prop("Amount")).
• Expenses: the actual charges. Create a database template per subscription with a relation to the subscription, then set the template to Repeat monthly (or yearly). Notion creates the row on schedule with the date filled in.

Q2: Now every charge is a real row with a date. On Expenses, a table view grouped by Date (Month) with Sum on Amount gives monthly totals. A chart view grouped by month and Category gives a report. On Subscriptions, summing Monthly cost shows your recurring baseline before anything is charged.

Free freelancer starter (clients and projects, overdue flags), if you're tracking business costs too: https://2rds.github.io/freelancer-ops/lite.html?ref=notionanswers