Future expenses are reflected in balances immediately

[sloria]

Describe the bug
When adding an expense dated in the future, the balances is updated immediately rather than on the date of the expense.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. "Add"
2. Select friend
3. Enter any description and amount
4. Change the date to a future date

Expected behavior
The balance does not change until the specified date.

App version
2.0.3

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• OS: macOS
• Browser: Firefox
• Version: 149.0.0

Smartphone (please complete the following information):

• Device: iPhone
• OS: iOS 26.3.1
• Browser: Safari

Additional context

Splitwise behaves correctly (balance updates on date of expense)

[krokosik]

Hm, I see that it differs from Splitwise, but this is rather counter intuitive for me. If I see an expense in the expense list I would expect it to be accounted in the balance. What's the use case of ignoring that?

[sloria]

For my use case, I'd rather see what is owed today. Large expenses scheduled for the future (e.g. rent) don't need to be paid off until after the expense date. Fwiw, this isn't a dealbreaker for my usage, but it does go against my expectation

[krokosik]

I see. Did you try out the new recurring expense functionality? Perhaps it will better suit your use case. I also look forward to feedback on how to improve it :)

[sloria]

Yes, that's actually how I stumbled on this. I made a recurring expense that starts in the future and my wife was surprised that she owed so much money 😛

Then I reproduced the issue with a non-recurring expense

[krokosik]

Huh, wait so they were all created at the same time or what? Because the way recurring expenses work is that no expense is created until the recurrence date, so balances should not show future transfers.

[sloria]

no, just the first expense gets added to the balance. minimal repro:

add a $50 transaction for April 30 with friend A. set it to recur monthly
expected: On April 30th, friend A's balance increases by $25
actual: friend A's balance increases by $25 immediately

[krokosik]

Hmm okay. So your use case would be to set a recurring transaction, but without creating the original one? That might be rough to support I'm afraid, because the way it is implemented, is that the original transaction HOLDS the recurrence rule in DB and most importantly serves as a template for future expenses. Currently, deleting that template removes the recurrence as well, yet it remains as a soft deleted expense (so it still lives in the DB).

A solution I could propose is to allow soft deleting a template, but keeping the recurrence rule, so you would have to create a recurring expense and then delete the current one. Would that work? Because if not I would prefer not to further complicate this feature.

[sloria]

it's moreso that i expect future expenses to be filtered out when computing the balance (whether they are recurring or not), since they're not yet relevant to the people i'm splitting expenses with until the expenses' actual date.