Concepts¶
Household, people, categories¶
- The household is everyone whose paperwork you follow. There is one per installation; set its name and default currency in Household.
- A person is a member of the household. A record belongs to one person or to the whole household (home insurance, lease…).
- A category groups records: Identity, Vehicle, Housing, Insurance, Health, Energy, Telecom, Banking, Taxes, Work, Education, Subscriptions, Other.
The household has an address (Household page); a person may have an own address, used instead of the household's in that person's letters.
Each category can have specific fields, shown in the record form and on the record page: a vehicle's registration number, an identity document's number, an address… Arca provides a few defaults; adapt them on the Categories page (add, rename, reorder, delete). A field is short text, long text, a date or a number; its type cannot change. Deleting a field erases its values. Search finds a record by these values. Like everything in Arca, they are not encrypted on disk: encrypt the disk (see Security and privacy).
Records¶
A record is one administrative item: Jean's passport, Home insurance. It holds the organization, a reference number, an optional amount with its currency and periodicity (monthly, yearly…), and free notes. The currency is pre-filled with the household's; each record can use another one.
A record can have an end date (a cancelled contract, an expired document). When you set or change it, the upcoming deadlines due after that date are ignored; the ones before it (the cancellation notice itself) stay. Removing the end date reopens nothing: reopen the deadlines you need on the record page. The day after its end date, the record is ended: it leaves the records list (tick Show ended records to see it), the counters and the annual cost; search still finds it.
Documents¶
A record can hold documents: scans, photos or PDFs (a registration certificate, the policy terms…). Each document keeps its successive versions: adding a new file to a document makes it the current version, and the older ones stay available until you delete them, one by one or all at once (Delete older versions). Version numbers are never reused.
Arca accepts PDF, JPEG, PNG, WebP and HEIC (iPhone photos) files, recognised by their content, up to 25 MB by default. PDF and images open in the browser; HEIC files, which most browsers cannot show, are downloaded. Search finds a record by the title of its documents.
Termination letters¶
From a record (or from one of its upcoming deadlines), Termination letter prepares a letter to the organization: your name and address (the person's own address when set, else the household's), the organization's address, the subject with the reference number, the effective date and a neutral text. Every part is editable, in English or French whatever the interface language. Print it, and Add to the record's documents to keep it as a PDF with the record's other documents; if you change a draft afterwards, the same button adds the new text as a new version of that document.
Arca keeps each letter as printed and follows it up: Mark as sent records the date, the sending method and a tracking number, and can create a reminder deadline to check the confirmation (30 days later by default); Confirmation received closes it. A sent letter can no longer be changed. Arca includes no legal rule: check the notice and the sending method your contract and country require (for example registered mail).
Deadlines¶
A record has any number of deadlines. Each one has:
- a kind: expiry, renewal, anniversary date, payment, other;
- a due date: the date of the event itself (the passport expires, the contract renews);
- an optional notice period, in days or months: how long before the due date you must act (cancel two months before the anniversary date);
- an optional action label, such as Send the notice. Without it, Arca shows the kind and the record title (Expiry — Passport);
- an optional recurrence, in months (every 12 months for a yearly contract).
Arca knows no law
Notice periods depend on the country and the contract. You enter them; Arca never assumes one.
The action date¶
The action date is the due date minus the notice period. It is the date that matters: the dashboard and the timeline use it.
| Due date | Notice | Action date |
|---|---|---|
| 26 November | 2 months | 26 September |
| 31 March | 1 month | 28 February (29 in leap years) |
| 15 June | none | 15 June |
Month arithmetic follows calendar months and stops at the end of short months.
Status and recurrence¶
A deadline is upcoming, done or ignored. When a recurring deadline becomes done, Arca creates the next occurrence with the same action, kind, notice period and recurrence. Marking it done again, or reopening it, never creates a duplicate.
Recurrences keep their day of the month: a monthly payment on the 31st falls on 28 February (29 in leap years), then comes back to 31 March. If you move a due date to another day, the following occurrences follow the new day.
The recurrence of a deadline and the periodicity of a record are not the same thing. The periodicity says how often the record's amount is paid: it only feeds the annual cost and creates no reminder. The recurrence says when a date comes back: it creates the next deadline, so the next reminder. A phone plan can have a monthly periodicity, a monthly payment deadline and a yearly anniversary deadline. A recurring payment added to a record whose amount has no periodicity gives it that rhythm.
Reading the dashboard¶
- The tiles count upcoming actions: overdue, within 30 days, and within 90 days (this last tile includes the first 30 days).
- The timeline lists each upcoming action once, in groups by range: overdue, within 30 days, in 31 to 90 days, in 91 days to a year. Actions further away appear on their record's page.
- Actions per month counts upcoming actions over the next 12 months; overdue ones are in their tile.
- Annual cost adds up the records that have both an amount and a periodicity (monthly × 12, quarterly × 4, half-yearly × 2, yearly × 1), per currency, never converted. Amounts without a periodicity are not counted. Ended records are not counted.
- Integrity shows the result of the last integrity check (see Operations).