Home

• Overview
• Overdue Bills
• Bills Due Today
• Alerts - Upcoming Bills

Calendar

• Overview

Bills

• Overview
• New Bill
• Bill Info
• Edit Bill
• Delete Bill
• New Payment
• Payment Amount
• Delete Payment
• Pie Chart

Billers

• Overview
• Payment History
• Line Chart

Tools

• Overview
• Backup / Restore
• Email Data
• Push Notification
• Settings

Overview - Home

When you first start Billinator the Home view will be shown.  The Home view provides a quick summary of all your bills.

Each entry in the table represents a single bill at a specific due date.  The entry contains information such as:

• Biller name - the biller that the bill is associated to.
• Date due - the date that this bill is due.
• Amount due - the dollar amount that is due.
• Bill status - indicates whether this bill is overdue, paid or unpaid.
• Repeating indicator - if the repeat indicator is beside a specific bill, the bill is part of a repeating bill series.  Otherwise it is a one time bill.

Overdue Bills

Overdue bills are colored in red.  When the current date passes the date due for a bill, Billinator will automatically change the bill status from unpaid to overdue if not paid in full.  If there are bills overdue, a popup will alert you of this on program launch.

Tip!  On program close, if there are still pending overdue bills, the program icon badge will show this.

Bills Due Today

Bills due today are any and all bills due today.  Even if a bill is paid, it will still show up here.  This is so that the user knows they have paid that bill.  If there are any bills due today and are unpaid, a popup will alert you of this on program launch.

Alerts - Upcoming Bills

A bill that has an alert specified on it will show up here.  An alert always occur before a bill is due.  If there are any alerts upcoming, a popup will alert you of this on program launch.

Overview - Calendar

The calendar view provides a visual overview of your monthly bills.  Below any of the days, if there are any bills present, a dot will indicate this.  The coloring scheme remains the same:  red for overdue, green for paid, and yellow for any unpaid bills. 

• The current date is highlighted in black. 
• The selected date is highlighted in blue.
• The 'Today' button returns to the current month.
• The Paid, Unpaid, All allow you to filter what shows in the calendar.
• Hit the + button to add a bill.  If you have selected a day prior, the new bill will default to this date.

Warning!  The calendar only shows bills for the selected month.  To see bills for either the previous or next month, you must navigate there.

Tip!  To navigate to the previous or next month, you can also click on the days of those months to navigate there.  For example, in the screen above, hitting the 28-30 days for June will navigate to June and hitting 1 on August will go to August.

Overview - Bills

The Bills tab is much like the Calendar view, but presents information in a tabular format.  The two views are kept in sync with one another.  Users can add / edit / delete bills from here.  A total is presented at the bottom.

New Bill

To add a new bill, press the + sign on the Bill tab.

Fill in the required information.

• Biller
• Repeat - this is the frequency at which the bill occurs.  For a repeat which is one time (ie. repeats never), only one date need be specified.
• Date - Will be either Date Due if repeat is never or Starts On / Ends On for a repeating bill.  For a bill which repeats, specify the dates that the bills starts on and the ending date.  The starting date is important for repeating bills as Billinator uses that date to start the series on.
• Amount - amount due.  For a repeating series this is the amount used for all bills in the series (this can be changed for an individual date later).
• Alert - if you wish to be alerted, specify an alert.

Bill Info

The bill info view shows the bill chosen from a table entry.  From here, you can edit a bill or series bill or make payments to a particular bill.  If you hit the paper clip icon, a popup containing the biller notes will appear.

            

Edit Bill

You can edit a bill's information by pressing 'Edit' from the Bill Info view.  If the bill is a series bill (ie. repeats) then you will get a warning popup (as below) asking what you would like to edit.  You have two options:

• Edit this bill only - this means you only want to edit the bill information for the particular bill date that you are currently looking at.
• Edit all future occurrences - this means you want to edit the series information.  Please note that all changes you make here will affect only future bills of this series.  If you want to edit information on bills in a series prior to today's date, you will need to go to the date in question and edit this bill only.   

Warning!  Editing future bills will not change entries where you have made an 'Edit this bill only' on.

Delete Bill

You can delete bills after editing a bill first.  The 'Delete Bill' button wil be there.  After selecting the delete button, you have two options if this bill is a series:

• Delete all future bills - deletes all bills after the current date.
• Delete entire series - deletes the entire bill series.

Warning!  If you made payments to a bill or to any of the bills in the series while trying to delete a series, Billinator will warning you of this and not allow the delete.  Please delete these payments first.  This is so you don't accidently delete a bill where you've made payments to.

New Payment

The new payment view is used to make a payment to bill.  It can be accessed by pressing on the desired bill and clicking on the 'Make Payment' button.   Each payment entry contains the following:

• Date Paid - date that the payment was made.
• Amount Paid
• Reference - Any reference number associated to the payment.
• Notes - Any notes you wish to include.

Only date paid and amount paid are required here.

Payment Amount

When a payment is made and the 'Amount Paid' field is pressed, the view changes to the one below to allow you enter the payment made.  Either enter the payment amount manually using the keypad or press the 'Pay Full Amount' button which will automatically insert the amount left to be paid into the field.

Delete Payment

You can delete individual payments made to a bill by clicking on a payment entry and then clicking on the 'Delete Payment' button.  A warning popup is displayed.  Note:  By deleting payment(s), the bill status can change from paid to unpaid or overdue.

Pie Chart

The pie chart gives you a visual representation of your bills for a particular month.  From the Bills tab, navigate to the month you are interested in and rotate the iPhone / iPod Touch to landscape orientation.  To return to the Bills view, rotate back to portrait orientation.

Select billers from the table on the right.  This will update the top banner with the accumulated total and percentage for the items you have selected. 

Tip!  Any filters you have selected prior to rotating will be reflected in this view also (ie.  if you have selected only paid bills before rotating, the pie chart data will only show paid bills for that month).

Overview - Billers

The Billers tab allows you to add / edit / delete billers.

Payment History

Billinator allows you to view all the payments made to a particular biller.  To access Payment History, select a biller from the Billers tab and click the 'Payment History' button.

The first date is the payment date and the date in brackets is the bill date due associated to the payment.  The amount and reference number are also included.

Line Chart

The line chart allows you to spot trends in your billing payments from a biller.  The chart shows what payments you actually made to this biller and for what date the payment was made.  From the Billers tab, select a biller, press the Payment History button and rotate the iPhone / iPod Touch to landscape orientation.  To return back to the regular view, rotate back to portrait orientation.

Select a point to see the actual values, the value and date of payment will be reflected in the banner.  If there are many payments, swipe either left or right and the chart will scroll to show more values.

Overview - Tools

The Tools tab bar will contain settings and configuration options related to Billinator.

Backup / Restore*

The Backup / Restore option allows the user to backup or restore the Billinator database.  The database is where all the bill information is stored.

Tip!  Before clicking on the Backup / Restore button, ensure both the iPod / iPhone and the local computer you wish to backup to / restore from is on the WIFI network.  Backup / Restore requires both to be on WIFI network.  Once the iPod/iPhone and the local computer are connected, press the button. 

If Billinator is successful in finding a connection, the following message appears below:

Open up a web browser on your local computer and type the whole connection string in your web browser.  For example, in the picture below, type 'http://192.168.1.101:49266'.  A webpage as shown below will appear:

Backup - Click the 'here' link to backup the database.  If the backup is successful an alert will appear on the iPod / iPhone.

Warning!  The backup file will be named as 'billinatorYYYMMDDHHMMSS.db'.  Everything after billinator is the date and time database was backed up.  Please do not rename the file.

Restore - On the webpage, select the database file to restore and click the 'Restore Database' button.  If the restore is successful an alert will appear on the iPod / iPhone.  Exit Billinator so that the restored database will take affect.

Tip!  When choosing the file to restore, choose the correct version using the date and time attached to the filename.  For example, a file name 'billinator20090907201215.db' was backed up on September 7th, 2009 at 8:12:15pm.  All data entered by the user up to this point will be on this database file.

*The backup / restore portion includes open source HTTP server software created by Deusty Designs.  For more information on this, please visit their open source site here.  Cellinova is grateful to Deusty Designs for their contributions.

Email Data

This Email Data option allows you to send yourself a CSV file of your data to an email address of your choice.

Enter the start and end date range for the data period you are interested in.

Warning!  The 'Payment Info' button toggles to YES or NO when pressed.  If YES then the exported data will include payment information in the CSV file.  Please keep in mind that you might have stored sensitive information such as reference number and notes attached to the payment.  This would be sent through email. 

Once you click 'Send', a progress bar will appear to show you how the export is proceeding.  There is two stages in the construction of the CSV file:  'Constructing Bills' and 'Constructing CSV'.  See below:

Push Notification

The Push Notification option allows you to initialize push notification and change the notification hour that the push alert is sent.  Please see our FAQ for further information.

When you first press Initialize, Billinator will register Push Notification with Apple and our server.  If all is successful, a message box will be displayed and the 'Last Initialized' will be populated with the date and time.

You do not have to initialize again unless one of the following conditions occur:

1. You removed Billinator and installed fresh again.

2. You do a restore database.

3. You turn off push notification from the Settings of the iPhone / iPod and then later a some point turn it back on.

Here's an example of a push notification alert.  A sound will also be played when the push alert is brought up. 

Settings

The settings tab allows you to customize and save settings in Billinator.

Amount Display - This controls how the bill row displays the amount.  You can choose amount due, amount left, or amount left / amount due.  An example of the three are displayed below.  Note that in the examples that the Mobile bill has a payment of $10.00.

 

 

Email - This will allow you to save a default email for use in the Email Data function.  Enter an email here and it will be prefilled when you go to Email Data.