Utilities & Bills

Work in progress

This page is a stub. Screenshots and step-by-step walkthroughs are coming.

A utility is a service tied to your home — electricity, gas, water, and so on. Each utility keeps its own bills, and — when it has a meter — its readings and consumption history.

Metered vs fixed-cost services

The service type decides how HomeLog treats it:

• Metered — electricity, gas and water. These get the Readings and Analysis tabs, and consumption is tracked between bills.
• Fixed-cost — waste (TARI is billed on surface area, not on consumption), internet, insurance, rent and mortgage. Instead of readings they get a Price history tab, which records every change in the amount from one bill to the next.

Meter readings

Log readings over time from the utility's Readings tab. HomeLog supports:

• single-value meters (gas, water),
• multi-band electricity meters (F1 / F2 / F3),
• estimated readings, when a bill is based on an estimate rather than a real one.

Bills

Store each provider invoice under Bills — amount, period, due date, and the provider's meter reading. A bill can be linked to one of your readings, which is what powers the consumption analysis.

The provider reading is the one the bill closes on, actual or estimated, with its date. Consumption between two bills is the difference of their closing readings, which nets out an estimate the next bill re-bills. Enter the meter serial number too: readings of different meters are never subtracted, so a meter replacement does not show up as negative consumption.

When you mark a bill as paid, HomeLog can automatically create the matching expense (and split it), using the payer configured for that service.

Bills for rent and mortgage services are filed under their own Rent/Mortgage subcategory of Home, so they no longer hide inside the Utilities slice of the dashboard.

The original PDF

Attach the provider's PDF to a bill — when you add it, or later with Replace — and open it again from the bill with View. Stored PDFs are private: only signed-in members of your household can open them.

Storage is capped per household (500 MB by default, see Self-Hosting) and uploads are rate-limited, so a burst of files is refused with a message instead of filling the disk.

Consumption analysis

The Analysis tab compares billed consumption against actual consumption between consecutive bills, so you can spot estimate errors or unexpected spikes.

Comparing your readings with the provider's

For each bill, HomeLog looks for the self-reading that belongs to it: one taken inside the bill's period or, failing that, the closest one within the reading window (15 days by default). It compares the two and marks the bill as OK, a warning or an anomaly.

The tolerance is a base threshold plus an extra amount per day between the two readings, so a reading taken a week early is judged more leniently than one taken the same day. Both thresholds, and the reading window, can be changed in Analysis → Comparison threshold settings. If you read the meter rarely, widen the window (up to 365 days).

When a bill shows No data, the message tells you why:

• no self-reading has been recorded for the service, or
• the closest one is outside the reading window. The message gives its date and how far it is from the bill: add a reading closer to that period, or widen the window.

A reading too far from a bill is deliberately not used — it would say nothing about that period.

Domiciliation & instalments

Two independent flags describe how a service is paid:

• Domiciled — paid automatically by direct debit.
• Instalment-based — billed in instalments.

A service can be either, both, or neither.

See PDF Bill Templates to automate reading figures straight from your provider's PDFs.