How to record a transfer

What a transfer is

A transfer is money leaving one wallet you own and arriving in another: a card paid off from a current account, cash drawn out, a savings pot topped up. Nothing was earned and nothing was bought.

That is why it takes no category and no budget: with nothing to label it as, the form does not ask.

Record the transfer

1. In the add-transaction form, fill in the wallet the money is leaving, its currency and amount, the date, and a comment if you want one.
2. Under Transaction Type, choose Transfer.
3. Pick the receiving wallet under Transfer To. The one you are sending from is not offered, so the two cannot be the same.
4. Enter the Received Amount: what actually landed.

Saving takes the amount that left off the first wallet's balance and adds what arrived to the second.

Transfers across currencies

SavingStat always asks for the received amount and never converts it for you: you enter what your bank actually credited, so the spread and the fee it took are recorded rather than guessed at.

If the amount you are entering is in a currency other than the sending wallet's, a second field appears for what left that wallet. The Currencies article explains why both figures are kept instead of one being converted away.

Why it matters how a transfer is recorded

File a transfer as an expense and money you still have is counted as money you spent. Do it at both ends and the same move shows up twice, as spending and as income, and every category, budget and monthly figure downstream inherits the double count.

Recorded properly, a transfer stays out of the way. The Stats pages are built from expense and income records, and a transfer creates neither, so they never see it. Your balances move; your spending does not.

An import can hand you a row it thinks is a transfer, but it cannot know where the money went. Such a draft will not publish until you pick the receiving wallet: that one field is checked, and the row is refused without it.

The received amount gets no such check. Leave it empty and the draft publishes with nothing arriving, which credits zero to the receiving side and leaves the money looking as though it evaporated. Type the figure in yourself while you are there.