Skip to content
Timelee home

Use case

Late fees are a reminder problem

Nobody misses a bill on purpose. You miss it because the warning went somewhere you do not look — a direct debit failed, the email about it landed in Promotions, and you found out through a charge.

Start with GoogleSee recurring reminders
A woman going through paper bills at a kitchen table

How a bill gets missed by someone who can afford it

Almost none of these are about money. They are about a notice arriving in a channel that does not ring.

  • The email went to a tab you never open

    Promotions, Updates, a filter you set up in 2019. The message was sent, technically delivered, and read by nobody. The first thing you actually read about it is the fee.

  • The payment date and the payday do not line up

    The rent goes out on the 1st and you are paid on the 3rd. It is not a shortfall, it is a sequencing problem, and it needs a warning days out rather than a reminder on the morning.

  • The card that expired

    A subscription, an insurance premium or a standing payment attached to a card that was replaced. Everything fails silently until something you rely on turns off.

  • The annual one

    The renewal notice arrived eleven months ago in an email you archived. The only reason you remember it in any given year is that last year it went wrong.

A set-up for the whole year, done once

About half an hour, in one sitting, and then it maintains itself.

  1. List everything that leaves the account

    Rent or mortgage, council tax, utilities, phone, insurance, subscriptions, the card minimum, anything annual. Work from a bank statement rather than from memory — the ones you forget on a page are exactly the ones you forget in life.

  2. Make each one a repeating reminder on its real date

    Monthly ones repeat monthly on the date they actually leave. Yearly ones repeat yearly. Set Repeat ends to Never for the standing commitments, and to a date for a fixed-term one.

  3. Put the warning where the money still moves

    Add a pre-alarm a few days ahead of the date. Timelee's presets go up to 5 hours, so for a multi-day warning set a second repeating reminder a few days earlier and keep the pre-alarm for same-day movement.

  4. Tag them all the same

    Type #bills as you create each one and you can pull the whole set up in one filter. In quick add the tag, the category and the priority all go on the same line: !high #bills @personal.

  5. Review the tag once a quarter

    Fifteen minutes, four times a year. Cancel what you no longer use, update anything whose amount or date changed, and delete the reminders for things that have ended.

The one place email earns its keep

Email is a bad channel for an urgent reminder and a good one for a record you can search later. Bills happen to be the case where you want both.

A repeating reminder in Timelee can be delivered by email as well as by a ring, and the message carries the full reminder detail to an address you set on the reminder itself. That is worth knowing for the paper trail: a searchable line in your inbox saying the insurance was due on the 14th.

Be clear about the limit, because it is a real one. Email delivery is available on repeating reminders, not on every kind of reminder in Timelee. The channels that reach you everywhere else are the alarm, the in-app call and a real phone call.

  • Email delivery is a repeating-reminder option, not a general one
  • The message carries the full reminder detail
  • Goes to an address you set on the reminder
A laptop screen showing an email inbox

The list most people end up with

  • Rent or mortgage, on the date it leaves, with a warning three days earlier
  • Council tax and utilities, monthly, tagged #bills
  • Phone and broadband, monthly, with the contract end date as a separate yearly reminder
  • Card payment dates — the statement date and the payment date are different things and both belong here
  • Insurance renewals, yearly, set a month early so there is time to compare rather than auto-renew
  • Subscriptions, on the date each one bills, so an unused one gets cancelled before it charges again
  • Any tax or filing date, yearly, at high priority
  • The date your card expires, which is the quiet cause of half the failed payments in the list above

The parts this set-up uses

  • Repeating reminders

    Monthly on a date, yearly, or on specific weekdays, with Repeat ends set to once, a count, a date, or never.

  • Pre-alarm

    A heads-up before the reminder itself — eight preset offsets, and you can stack more than one on the same reminder.

  • A #bills tag

    Free text, typed inline as you capture. One filter shows every money commitment you have.

  • Priorities

    Low, Medium, High and Urgent, and a view that regroups the same list into First, Then and Later.

  • Email on repeats

    A repeating reminder can go out by email as well, which gives you something searchable later.

  • History

    Completed reminders stay in History, so you can check whether the invoice went out on the 3rd instead of assuming.

Timelee never touches your money

There is no bank connection, no open-banking link and no payment feature of any kind. Timelee does not know what you owe, what you paid, or what is in an account. It rings at the times you set and it records what you marked as done. Everything financial happens in your bank, where it should.

Put this month's dates in before the next one lands

Sign in with Google, open a statement, and set up the five payments that actually leave your account. Free to start.

Start with GoogleSee what the free plan includes

Keep reading