Central Brain — a short guide

Getting started

You pick what you want to track — an apartment, a house, vehicles, personal finances, subscriptions, receipts — and the tab bar is built from that. You can change the choice any time in Settings ▸ Sections; nothing is deleted, it just stops being shown.

The bar holds five sections. Enable more and Subscriptions move inside Finance as a switch at the top — the app tells you when that happens.

Vehicles

Add a vehicle with + and pick the make and model. Service intervals are prefilled from the drivetrain — an EV gets no oil and no spark plugs, but tire rotation, brake fluid and a battery check instead.

• ·The odometer — log the reading now and then; the app estimates the mileage in between and works out when a service is due.
• ·Done — after a service, tap the item and mark it done; its interval starts over.
• ·Technical inspection (STK), insurance, motorway vignette — dates a notification reminds you about.
• ·Fuel — optional; log it and you see the consumption and the cost per kilometer.

House and apartment

A property carries its inspections — chimney, gas boiler, wiring, lightning rod, sewage treatment, a well. You can keep the technician's contact details and the scanned certificate with each one, so next time you are not hunting for who you called last year.

An inspection's due date can be sent to Calendar or Reminders with the buttons right in its form — the same way as a payment's.

Payments and subscriptions

A payment carries its due date, amount and Czech bank details, from which the app draws a SPAYD QR code — point your banking app at it and the order is filled in. It works the other way too: scan the QR code on an invoice and the payment creates itself.

Subscriptions are the same payments on a monthly or yearly cycle; the top of the screen shows what they cost together.

What “a month” means

There are two honest answers, and Settings ▸ Monthly figures is where you pick the one you want to see. What's due that month counts only what is genuinely due — a yearly premium of 12,000 shows in full in its billing month and in no other; this is the default. Monthly average spreads yearly and half-yearly bills evenly, so the same premium comes out as 1,000 every month — stable, but no single month really costs that.

The choice applies to every monthly figure in the app: the dashboard, properties, vehicles, finance and subscriptions. The other reading is never hidden — the dashboard shows both, one large and one beneath it. Receipts are never counted in any of it, because they are purchases already paid for, not payments still ahead of you.

The payment calendar

The dashboard lays the whole year out month by month, with the current month marked. Tap a month to see its total and how many bills make it up, and open the categories to see the individual payments, each one a tap from its detail. The arrows move to the next year. If you prefer a chart, switch to one in Settings ▸ Finance overview.

When a payment starts counting

A recurring payment is counted in the overviews only from its start date — the “Paying since” field when you edit it. A new payment starts on the day you enter it; a bill you enter after it fell due is counted from its due date. You can change the date at any time. A one-off payment has no “since”: it belongs to its own month.

Payments created before that date existed in the app are counted from the earliest price the app knows for them. Where it knows none, they keep being counted in earlier years as before — until you set the date yourself with “Set when it started”.

Past months are counted at the price that applied back then, taken from the price history. Rent that went up in July is not reported at the new rate for March.

Payment history and refunds

Mark a payment paid and a record appears under Payment history in its detail: the day you paid, the amount, and the due date it settled. Tap a record to correct the day the money really left your account, or the amount. An earlier payment goes in by hand through Add a record ▸ Log a payment, and the full history shows totals year by year.

A refund is logged the same way — an overpayment returned after an energy statement, or a deposit you got back (Add a record ▸ Log a refund). Refunds are not counted in the monthly overviews: those show what is due, not the balance of your account.

Payments that pay themselves — a standing order, a subscription — create no records on their own; add them by hand if you want them in the history. Every payment also has room for a note. The start date, the note and the history records are all part of the backup export, and older backups still load.

Receipts and warranties

This section is for what people photograph into their notes today and then fail to find.

• ·Scan a receipt — or pick a photo from your library; the shop, date and amount are read off it. The category is guessed from the name. Everything is editable — it is a suggestion, not a verdict.
• ·For whom — is free text: write the names you actually use at home.
• ·A photo of the item — pays off. A year later you recognize the shoes by sight long before you remember the model.
• ·Search — understands several words at once. “shoes” finds football boots and sandals as well, because it matches the category and not just the title; “shoes Decathlon” narrows it to one shop, “shoes 2026” to one year. The assistant answers the same questions the same way.
• ·A warranty claim — goes in from the button in the detail — or straight from the reminder: swipe it, tap View and choose File a claim. While the item is with the seller the days are counted; they are added to the warranty end date according to how you close the claim.

The assistant

A floating bubble, or the button on the Dashboard. Ask in a normal sentence — what the car insurance costs, when you last had the chimney inspected, where the receipt for those shoes is. It answers from your own data.

It runs entirely on the phone; no question is sent to a server. On devices without Apple Intelligence a simpler keyword mode takes over — the answers about your data stay the same.

Calendar and Reminders

A payment's due date or an inspection date can be sent to the system Calendar or to Reminders — with the Add to Calendar and Add to Reminders buttons in the payment's detail and in the inspection's form.

• ·Calendar — creates an all-day event on the due date, with an alert seven days ahead at 9:00 a.m. It is saved to the system's default calendar: the app has write-only access to Calendar and reads neither your calendars nor your events, which is why it offers none to choose from.
• ·Reminders — a reminder due on that day goes into the list you choose in Settings ▸ Reminders & notifications ▸ Reminders list. Until you choose one, the default list is used. The list names are read on the device for that choice only and are sent nowhere.

Exporting is optional; the app's own notifications do not depend on it.

Shortcuts and Siri

Central Brain offers five actions for the Shortcuts app and for Siri.

• ·What's due — reports what is overdue and what is coming up.
• ·Upcoming payments — how many payments fall due in the next 30 days, their total, and the three nearest — not the whole list.
• ·Log a fill-up — records a refueling or charging stop for the vehicle you pick.
• ·Update odometer — sets a vehicle's odometer reading.
• ·Add a payment — creates a payment with a due date.

The actions that write data, and the payment overview, need an unlocked device. The payment overview also gives no amounts while the app lock or hidden amounts is switched on — it points you to the app instead.

Sharing and sync

Without Premium the data lives on the phone. With Premium it mirrors through your own iCloud between iPhone and iPad, and you can share the household with one more person, who then sees and edits the same records. You can give them read-only access instead.

We cannot reach your data; it is your iCloud, not our servers.

Where the deadlines come from — and how to change them

The app is built for the Czech market, so the defaults follow Czech rules:

• ·A 24-month warranty — more precisely, the period in which a consumer may report a defect that appears on the item (§ 2165(1) of the Czech Civil Code). For an item sold as used the parties may agree on twelve months (§ 2168); a business purchase is not a consumer sale, so the length is whatever you agreed with the seller. Hence the 24 months / 12 months / no warranty switch on a receipt.
• ·Days in a claim — where the buyer reported the defect legitimately, the period does not run for as long as they cannot use the item (§ 2165(4)). The app adds those days to the end date according to the outcome you record; a rejected claim leaves the date alone.
• ·A replacement — the app then counts the warranty again from the date of the exchange. That is the app's default behavior, not a quotation from the statute; if your seller tells you otherwise, overwrite the date.
• ·Inspections — a chimney yearly (government regulation 34/2016 Coll.), a solid-fuel boiler and gas pipework every three years (Clean Air Act 201/2012 Coll.; decree 85/1978 Coll.), a lightning rod every four years for installations from 2009 (ČSN EN 62305) and five for older ones (ČSN 34 1390), wiring every five years (ČSN 33 1500), a domestic sewage plant every two.

None of those numbers is fixed. Switch the warranty to 12 months or turn it off, set the end date by hand, put an inspection on your own cycle. If your seller gave you five years, write five years — which is what makes the app usable outside Czechia too.