Credit card
A credit card, an instalment plan, an overdraft — an account whose balance may be negative: that is not “minus in the wallet” but debt. On top of bookkeeping it has a “Payoff” tab: the interest-free-period timeline, the cost of credit and a calculator.
How to create one
- On the “Accounts” screen press + New account.
- Type — “Credit card”.
- Opening balance — the current debt with a “−” sign. Owe nothing? Leave it empty.
- The credit limit and the rate outside the grace period. The limit draws the utilisation bar on the card; the rate is only used for the forecast — the actual interest arrives as transactions in the “Loan interest” category.
- Choose the interest-free-period mechanic and fill in the cycle: statement day, grace length, payment deadline, minimum payment. The fields are optional — but without them the “Payoff” tab has nothing to work with.
- Has the card been in use for a while? Switch on “Set when you started using the card” and pick a date — otherwise the period calculation will assume the card only appeared in your life today.
The card appeared in the app later than in your life
The interest-free-period calculation only sees the account history that exists in the book: it starts when you created the account, or with its first transaction. For a card you have been using for years but only entered into Svodly yesterday that is wrong: the real statement and its deadline exist earlier, and until the first “own” statement the app answered, honestly but uselessly, “no statement debt”.
The credit account form — on the computer, on the web and on the phone — has a “Set when you started using the card” switch with a date:
- the statement mechanic starts presenting statements from that date, together with their deadlines;
- the “single deadline for the whole debt” mechanic counts the period from it when the start is not visible from the transactions;
- a debt hanging over from a long-overdue statement is honestly shown as “the period has been missed”.
The date is optional: leave it out and everything is counted as before. It syncs between devices and is part of the book's portable format.
A savings account already had such a date — “Accrue from” on automatic interest accrual.
The interest-free period and the payoff
A credit card has a “Payoff” tab in the account card. Fill in the cycle parameters (they are optional fields of the account form), and the app computes:
- The interest-free period — a timeline of the cycle “statement → today → deadline”: how much and by which date to pay in so as not to pay interest, a traffic-light of urgency and a Make a payment button. The statement's payoff amount is computed from the transactions.
- The cost of credit — the minimum payment, the rate outside the grace period with an estimate “≈ N ₽/mo on the current debt” and “Paid to the bank” from the real transactions in the “Loan interest” category.
- The payoff calculator — you set a payment and get the closing date, the overpayment and the debt-reduction chart; there are presets “make it interest-free” and “minimum only”.
In the card header such an account shows “Debt” instead of “Balance −”, and below the limit bar — a compact line of the period. When a week or less is left before the deadline, the reminder also appears on the Summary.
Two mechanics of the interest-free period
Banks count the grace period differently, and the app asks which one it is — with a switch in the credit account form:
- “A new statement with its own deadline every month” (the default). That is how Sber's “120 days”, T-Bank and most cards work: on the statement day the current cycle closes and gets its own payment deadline. Several unclosed statements can be open at once.
- “A single deadline for the whole debt” — the mechanic of VTB's “Karta vozmozhnostey” and Alfa's “100 days”: the period starts on the 1st of the month in which you made a purchase with a zero balance, and by its end the whole debt has to be repaid, including purchases from the following months. Paying it off in full opens a new period.
The choice changes both the arithmetic and the look of the “Payoff” tab. With a single deadline the statement day and the payment date are not needed — those fields are hidden in the form — and the tab shows one timeline “start → today → end” headed “Repay the whole debt of N by …”. The minimum payment is worked out from the current debt.
It is worth setting the mechanic straight away: on a card with a single deadline the monthly model would show an understated “pay by” amount — the debt of the oldest statement instead of the whole debt. That is the expensive direction to be wrong in.
The next statement and the open ones
On cards with a long grace period a new interest-free window opens every month, and a single line cannot tell you which cycle today's purchase falls into. So in the active phase of the timeline there is a line “Next statement — ⟨date⟩: new purchases will go into it”.
And when two or more statements are unclosed, an “Open statements” list appears under the timeline: the statement date → how much it added to the debt → the date to pay by. An overdue one is highlighted. The amounts in the list are incremental — they add up to the whole unclosed debt; a statement with no new spending adds no row.
The caption under the list is a reminder of the mechanic: a payment settles the oldest statement first — which is exactly why the nearest deadline matters more than the total.