Daily Life Cost: what one day costs you

The problem

Monthly totals hide how you actually live. Rent is paid once a month, insurance once a year, school fees once a term. On the day they leave your account they look huge, and on every other day they are invisible.

A more useful question is: “What does it cost me to exist for one day?”

How Porul handles it

The Daily Life Cost card on your home screen answers that with one number, per day:

Daily Life Cost = every expense you logged in the last year ÷ days in the year

• Every expense means everything you logged as an expense: everyday expenses, plus the rent, EMIs and bills you marked as paid.
• The last year is a rolling window: the last 365 days up to today (366 in a leap year). It follows your recent life and doesn’t reset on 1 January.
• Days in the year is 365, or 366 in a leap year.

Big once-a-year costs like insurance or school fees are spread across the whole year this way, so the day they are paid doesn’t distort the picture.

New to Porul? Your expenses are still divided by the full year, even if you’ve only logged for a week. One big purchase in your first week won’t make your daily cost look enormous. The number grows as you log, and settles once you have a year of history. If you haven’t logged anything yet, it shows 0.

Fixed Expenses: plan the month, log without missing anything

Tap the Daily Life Cost card to open Fixed Expenses. This page has two jobs:

• Plan your month. The footer shows this month’s fixed expenses: your monthly bills, plus any quarterly or yearly bills due this month, plus every due date of bills that repeat every few days (a 28-day recharge is due twice in some months). The Budget takes exactly this amount from your income first, so you budget only what’s really left.
• Log without missing anything. Fixed bills repeat, so you can mark them paid here, one at a time or several at once. Once logged, they count in your Daily Life Cost like any other expense.

Also on this page:

• Enter your expected monthly income at the top (used by the Budget too). It also shows what your income comes to per day.
• Add, edit or delete bills. For each bill, set the name (pick its category from the chip inside the name field), amount, how often it repeats (monthly, every 2 months, quarterly, half-yearly, yearly, or every N days), the due day or next due date, and its nature and domain. Choose Every N days for plans like a 28, 56 or 84-day mobile recharge: type the number of days in Repeats every, next to the frequency.
• See what each bill costs per day. Every bill shows its cost per day, and the footer shows Fixed bills / day for all of them, next to this month’s total. Plans with different cycles become easy to compare: a 340 recharge every 28 days is 12.14 per day, while a 1,740 plan for 360 days is 4.83 per day. This is a planning figure from your bill list, not your Daily Life Cost, which counts only what you log.
• Bills that repeat every few days are grouped with this month’s total in the group header: a 340 recharge due twice this month shows 680, with “Due 2× this month” underneath.
• Porul starts you with a set of common default bills. Edit them or remove what doesn’t apply.
• On the home screen, a bills icon at the top shows how many bills are due and unpaid, and opens this page. It disappears when nothing is due, and it never sends pop-ups or notifications.

Loans you add to your budget appear here as EMI bills. See Loans.

What it doesn’t change with

The card does not move when you switch the Today, Week, Month or Year toggle on the home screen. That toggle only affects the Need / Want / Oops breakdown, which counts from the start of the current day, week (from Sunday), month or year, and shows the total and the average per day so far. Daily Life Cost is meant to be a steady number, not a moving one.

There is also a longer view of your Need / Want / Oops split over your whole history in Analytics.

Example

It’s September, you’ve just started with Porul, and your fixed bills are:

Bill	Amount	How often	Due
Rent	900	monthly	every month
Internet	30	monthly	every month
Insurance	1,200	yearly	next March

Fixed Expenses footer (this month): 900 + 30 = 930. Insurance isn’t due this month, so it isn’t included. Budget takes 930 from your income before you plan the rest.

Daily Life Cost: nothing logged yet, so it shows 0.

Over your first month you log 3,650 in everyday expenses and mark rent and internet as paid (930). That’s 4,580 of expenses in the last year: 4,580 ÷ 365 = about 12.55 per day. The card rounds to whole units, so it shows 13. Porul keeps the exact figure behind the scenes for every calculation.

In March you mark the insurance as paid. The 1,200 adds about 3.29 per day for the next twelve months, and then drops out of the window.