Cycles allow you to organise your payables based on your preferences (i.e. when and how you prefer to pay bills).
It does not automate payments, meaning you stay in control of your money. What it does do, is to lighten the load of manual work required to create and organise payment batches.
Using Cycles
When Cycles are active, bills in the ‘Ready to pay’ section will be organised based on when you plan to pay them. Each bill will either be ‘Unplanned’ or assigned to a specific cycle corresponding to a date.
For example, if you pay bills weekly on a Friday before their due, all bills will automatically be organised into weekly cycles. On each Friday, you’d pay everything due the following week.
You can always update the planned cycle for each bill manually.
If you don’t want a specific bill to be paid, you can mark it as ‘Unplanned’, removing it from any planned cycle. If you want to pay selected bills in a different cycle (for example, you typically pay bills before they’re due, but you want to pay a specific supplier this week) you can manually update each bill by moving it to a different cycle.
Note: Any bills payable to ‘Direct Debit’ contacts are excluded from planned cycles, but show up in the ‘Unplanned’ cycle so you have visibility on upcoming spending while ensuring you don’t accidentally pay Direct Debit bills via Apron.
If you’d like to learn more about marking contacts as Direct Debit, please take a look here.
Setting up Cycles
In the top-right corner of the ‘Ready to pay’ tab, click ‘+ Cycles’ to open the Cycles settings. Cycles settings consist of two components:
Cycles schedule determines how often you prefer to pay bills.
Default payment terms determine in which cycle you will pay each bill, relative to its due date.
Cycles schedule
Available options: Once a week, Every 2 weeks, and Once a month.
Once a week and Every 2 weeks allow you to set a recurring weekly cadence for a specific day of the week.
When setting up cycles, the first cycle date will be the next time that date occurs. For example, if you select ‘Every 2 weeks’ and 'Friday', the cycle schedule will start from that upcoming Friday.Once a month allows you to set a recurring monthly cadence for a specific day of the month.
If you choose the 29th, 30th, or 31st, and a given month has fewer days, we will automatically set the cycle date to the last day of the month.
Default payment terms
Determine which planned day should be assigned, with respect to a bill's due date:
Before due date
Allows you to plan all bills to be paid before their due date. For example, on a weekly schedule, each cycle will include all bills due in the next 7 days.After due date
Allows you to plan all bills to be paid in the cycle just after they come due. For example, on a weekly schedule, each cycle will include all bills due in the previous 7 days.Around due date
Allows you to plan a combination of bills due around a given date, so you can pay some bills recently due, and some with due dates upcoming. For example, on a bi-weekly schedule, each cycle will include all bills due in the previous 7 days and all bills due in the next 7 days.
Note: Setting up Cycles is only available to members who can also create payments. If you don’t have these permissions, please ask another member of your team or any Admin.
Updating your setup
You can change your cycle settings at any time. Just click on the ‘Cycles’ button in the top-right corner of the ‘Ready to Pay’ section. From here, you can set up a new payment schedule and/or update the default payment terms.
Note: Once you confirm the changes, all bills will be moved to the new setup, even those that had been manually updated.
Have we missed something you're still unsure of about Cycles? Get in touch via the in-app chat.