Reminders and alerts — every notification

Nobody opens a budgeting app every single day out of willpower. Notifications are how Pocketbird carries the habit for you — a nudge at the hour you usually sit down, a heads-up three days before a card is due, a warning the moment a category tips over its budget.

There are three kinds and they behave differently. Scheduled reminders are set up once and then arrive on a clock. Instant alerts fire off your own numbers, the moment your spending crosses a line. Group push is the only kind that comes from the internet — everything else is computed and scheduled on your iPhone, so no server ever sees your budgets or your bills.

• Pocketbird never puts a red badge number on its icon. It asks iOS for the badge permission but nothing in the app ever sets a count.
• No notification has buttons on it. Every one is tap-to-open — you cannot act on a Pocketbird notification from the lock screen without going into the app.
• There is no Live Activity and nothing in the Dynamic Island, and no silent background push — the only pushes that exist are ones you can see.

Every switch lives on one screen. There are seven notification switches there, and the screen is reached the same way whichever one you want.

1. 1Go to "More" / "เพิ่มเติม" → "Settings" / "ตั้งค่า" → "Profile & Budget Cycle" / "โปรไฟล์ & รอบงบ", in the "Profile & Setup" section. (The compact tab bar is customizable, so this is the default layout; on iPad every tab is a sidebar row and there is no More hub.)
2. 2Flip the switch you want. The first time you turn one from off to on, iOS asks for notification permission.
3. 3Some switches reveal a picker underneath once they are on — a reminder time, a recap day.
4. 4To turn one off, flip it back. Nothing else to do — see the note about there being no Save.

You do not have to go hunting for that screen, though. Once you have logged at least one transaction and still have not granted permission, a card with a bell appears above the Transactions list. Tapping it opens the priming sheet, "Stay ahead of your money 🐦" / "รู้ก่อน จัดการเงินก่อน 🐦", which explains what the reminders are for before iOS asks anything.

• "Turn on notifications" / "เปิดการแจ้งเตือน" asks iOS, and if you allow it switches four reminders on at once — Daily Logging Reminder, Payday Reminder, Bill-Due Reminder and Weekly Recap — and schedules them there and then. Budget Alerts is already on.
• If you already have a live recurring expense, the sheet's third bullet prints that bill's real name, so you can see exactly what it is offering to remind you about.
• The card never appears before your first transaction, and never once permission has been granted. It re-checks whenever you open the Transactions tab and every time the app becomes active.
• These switches are per-device. They are not synced, so turning the daily reminder off on your iPhone leaves it on on your iPad.
• Signing out clears every scheduled and already-delivered notification, resets the per-cycle alert throttle, wipes the opt-in card's history and deletes this phone's push registration — so nothing from the account you just left can still fire.

An expense you don't write down within a day is usually never written down. Two reminders exist for that one problem: one at the hour you tend to wind down, one on the morning money arrives.

• The daily reminder runs on a genuinely repeating trigger, so it keeps arriving even if you never reopen the app. It is re-armed on every launch and every return to the foreground, and re-arming replaces rather than stacks.
• It ships on for brand-new accounts only. If you turned it off at some point, it stays off — the default is never re-applied to you.
• The payday reminder's date comes from the same cycle resolver the whole app uses. A payday of 29, 30 or 31 anchors to the last day of a short month, so February still gets one.
• If you turned on "Shift Weekend Paydays Earlier" / "เลื่อนวันเงินเดือนที่ตรงวันหยุดสุดสัปดาห์ให้เร็วขึ้น", or set a one-off cycle-start override, or added a holiday, the reminder follows the shifted date rather than the calendar one.

One switch, "Bill-Due Reminder" / "เตือนบิลครบกำหนด", arms every upcoming-payment reminder the app can compute. It ships off. Once on, all of them fire at 09:00 on their computed day, under the title "Bill due 💸" / "บิลครบกำหนด 💸".

• A debt with a payment due day — 3 days before the due date.
• A credit card with a payment due day — 3 days before, same rules as a debt.
• A fixed-amount recurring expense — 1 day before it posts, unless you change the lead on that rule.
• A variable (estimated) bill — on the due day itself, because that is when the real amount arrives.
• A subscription with a trial end date — 2 days before the free trial ends.

1. 1Arm a debt: More → Debts → tap the debt → Edit → "Payment Due Day" / "วันครบกำหนดชำระ" → pick "Day %lld" / "วันที่ %lld" instead of "None" / "ไม่ระบุ".
2. 2Turn on "Bill-Due Reminder" in Settings → Profile & Budget Cycle, if it isn't already.
3. 3That's it — the plan is recomputed the moment the debt is saved, not at some later sync.

• Only money you owe reminds. A receivable — money owed to you — never schedules one, and its due-day picker is hidden entirely.
• A debt whose live balance has reached 0 through logged payments stops reminding. A credit card must currently be owed; an archived or deleted card drops out at the next re-arm.
• A due day of 31 anchors to the last day of short months, exactly like payday does.
• A due date landing on a Saturday, Sunday or one of your own holidays always moves to the previous working day — for everyone, whether or not you turned on the payday weekend shift.
• The body reads "%@ — due in %lld days" / "%1$@ ครบกำหนดอีก %2$lld วัน", with the amount appended when the app knows one — a debt's installment, or a card's minimum payment plus any active installment monthly total.
• The whole set is planned in one pass and replaces everything pending — at app launch, on every return to the foreground, and whenever you save Profile & Budget Cycle, save a debt, log a debt payment, save an account, or pause, skip, snooze or delete a recurring rule. A reminder for something you just deleted therefore disappears at the next re-arm.

Electricity and water are never the same twice, so a recurring rule marked as an estimated amount is treated differently. Its reminder lands on the due day itself rather than early, and it is the one notification in Pocketbird you can actually act on.

1. 1At 09:00 on the due day you get "Bill due 💸" with the body "%@ is due — tap to confirm the amount" / "%@ ถึงกำหนดแล้ว — แตะเพื่อยืนยันจำนวนเงิน".
2. 2Tap it. The confirm sheet for that exact rule opens, already loaded.
3. 3Type what you were really charged. It posts as a transaction.

• The tap survives a cold launch: it is held behind the sign-in and consent screens and presented once you are in.
• A stale tap is dropped silently. If that occurrence was skipped, snoozed forward, already confirmed, the rule deleted, or the rule switched to a fixed amount, nothing opens — better than a confirm sheet for a bill that is no longer due.
• The same action lives in the app: Recurring → the rule → the amber banner "Bill due — confirm the amount" / "ถึงกำหนดชำระ — ยืนยันยอด", with the line "This estimated bill has reached its due date. Tap to confirm what you were actually charged." / "บิลโดยประมาณนี้ถึงกำหนดแล้ว แตะเพื่อยืนยันยอดที่ถูกเรียกเก็บจริง".

One day's warning is right for a bill that pays itself and wrong for rent you have to transfer by hand. Each recurring expense can carry its own lead, and a subscription can carry a second, separate reminder about its free trial.

• Income rules never remind — that is the payday reminder's job. Transfer rules never remind either, because moving money between your own accounts is not a bill.
• Paused, ended and deleted rules schedule nothing.
• A rule saved without a name shows up as "Recurring bill" / "บิลรายการประจำ".
• Only future fire moments are scheduled — anything already in the past is dropped rather than delivered late.

These are the ones you never schedule. They read your own numbers and speak up on their own — one switch for budgets, one for pace, one for the weekly summary.

• Each band fires at most once per cycle per category — 80% once, then 100% once. A single purchase that vaults straight past 100% fires only the over alert and skips the redundant near one. The bookkeeping resets when a new cycle starts.
• The limit quoted is the effective limit: a per-cycle override or a rollover carry-in is already folded in, so it matches what the Budget screen shows. A category whose carry pushed its effective limit to 0 or below is skipped.
• Shop and business spending is partitioned out — only personal transactions count towards these alerts.
• A purchase against a subcategory is checked against its own budget and its parent's rolled-up budget independently, so both can warn you.
• Only the newest alert per category stays in Notification Center — a re-crossing replaces the old one instead of piling up. The overall-budget alert shares one slot the same way.
• Your "pace" for the over-pace alert is your effective overall budget limit if you set one, otherwise this cycle's logged income, otherwise the monthly salary in your profile. If all three are zero the alert can never fire. Very early in a cycle, or with no spending yet, there is no projection and nothing fires.
• None of these ever trigger the iOS permission dialog. If you never granted permission, they silently do nothing.

The weekly recap is the calm one. On "Recap Day" / "วันสรุป" at "Recap Time" / "เวลาสรุป" it sums the trailing 7 days of expenses under the title "Your weekly recap 🐦" / "สรุปรายสัปดาห์ของคุณ 🐦", with one of three bodies: ahead of pace, keeping pace, or — when there is no pace to compare against — "This week you spent %@. Tap to see where it went."

Everything else in this chapter is your own phone talking to you. Group activity is not: when someone in a shared group does something, Apple's push service delivers it even with Pocketbird closed. That is the point — a bill someone else added is news you cannot compute locally.

• "New group member" / "สมาชิกใหม่ในกลุ่ม" — "%@ joined %@" / "%1$@ เข้าร่วม %2$@".
• "New shared bill" / "บิลใหม่ในกลุ่ม" — "%@ added a bill: %@" / "%1$@ เพิ่มบิล: %2$@".
• "Bill settled" / "ชำระบิลแล้ว" — "%@ settled their share of %@" / "%1$@ ชำระส่วนแบ่งของ %2$@ แล้ว".
• "New contribution" / "มีเงินสมทบใหม่" — "%@ added %@ to %@" / "%1$@ สมทบ %2$@ เข้า %3$@", for a shared pocket.
• "New shop activity" / "กิจกรรมร้านใหม่" — a logged sale ("%@ logged a sale: %@") or a logged cost ("%@ logged a cost: %@").
• "Shop ownership changed" / "เปลี่ยนเจ้าของร้าน" — "%@ is now the owner of %@" / "%1$@ เป็นเจ้าของ %2$@ แล้ว".
• "Shop entry removed" / "ลบรายการในร้าน" — "%@ removed an entry in %@" / "%1$@ ลบรายการใน %2$@", when an owner deletes someone else's entry.

• Three things must all be true or nothing is delivered: you are signed in, you granted cloud-sync consent (registering for push uploads a device identifier, which counts as cloud processing), and iOS notification permission is granted.
• You never get a push for your own action — the person who did the thing is excluded from the recipient list every time. On a settle, the one excluded is whoever tapped settle, while the person named in the message is whose share got settled.
• Tapping one opens that group's detail screen.
• Turning "Group Activity" off does not unregister anything — it flips a flag on this phone's device record so the server stops sending here. Turning it on is the one place in Settings where the iOS permission dialog can appear on the push path.
• The wording is rendered on your phone in your language — the server sends keys, not finished sentences. Amounts arrive already formatted with a ฿ prefix.
• Signing out deletes this phone's push registration from the server and stops delivery.

The Pocketbird team can also send a one-off announcement to specific accounts, written literally rather than assembled from keys, and your phone gets whichever language matches it. There is no user switch for these: turning Group Activity off does not stop them, because the announcement query deliberately ignores that flag — iOS permission is the only gate. One send reaches at most 200 recipients, with a 100-character title, a 240-character body and a 300-character link.

• An announcement with no link just opens the app.
• A budgie:// link opens that screen inside the app — budgie://whats-new opens the What's New sheet, budgie://feature-votes opens the feature-vote board.
• An https:// link opens in the system browser. No other scheme is accepted — it is rejected on the server and again on your phone before it can do anything.

Some of Pocketbird's prompts look like notifications but never enter Notification Center. They only appear when you open the app, which is also why turning notifications off does not stop them.