Drafts

What a draft is

A draft is a transaction that has been suggested but not accepted. It sits outside your data rather than in it: absent from your transaction list, and no wallet balance has moved for it.

Status and type are separate questions, and draft answers only the first. A draft expense is both at once, an expense on one axis and a draft on the other. Neither answer tells you the other.

Where they come from

Drafts are what a review step produces. A bank statement and a photograph of a receipt both end the same way: rows proposed for you to look at, none of them yet part of your records.

Imports covers how a file becomes a set of drafts, and Review AI drafts walks through going over them.

What publishing does

Publishing is the one way off draft, and there is no way back.

Three things happen at that moment. The edits you made while reviewing are applied. The wallet balance moves for the first time, since a draft never touched it. And for an expense, the sum over its lines runs for the first time, which is why a draft never sits at pending or partially completed while it waits.

What is checked, and what is not

Publishing refuses a draft with no wallet. Nothing can move a balance that has not been told which balance to move.

A transfer draft is refused as well unless its transfer details have been set up. An import can propose that money moved between two of your wallets, but it cannot know which wallet received it, so that one is checked and the row is held back without it.

The received amount on a transfer is not checked the same way. Leave it and the draft publishes with nothing arriving, which credits the receiving wallet with zero and leaves the money looking as though it evaporated. Type it in while you are reviewing.

Amending and discarding

A draft can be amended before it is published, and amending one never publishes it as a side effect. The sum that would otherwise run over an expense's lines is skipped for exactly that reason: without the skip, editing a line to match the amount would quietly approve the row while its wallet balance stayed untouched.

Drafts you do not want can be discarded. Clearing an import's drafts removes the rows it proposed and leaves everything you had already published alone, since a published transaction is no longer a draft and is not what the clearing looks at.