Income sources

What an income source is

An income source is a name for somewhere money arrives from: an employer, a client, a tenant, a refund stream. It has a name and a colour, and deliberately little else. A source is a label, not an account. Where the money landed is the wallet's job.

Every income you record can name one, and a source is reusable: the same employer sits behind every salary payment rather than each one arriving unattached. Sources you have stopped using can be archived, the same as categories. They stop being offered without disturbing the income already recorded against them.

Why income is not just a negative expense

Money coming in could have been recorded as an expense with a minus sign in front of it. It is not, and the reason is what you get out of the other end.

Spending breaks down by category; income breaks down by source in exactly the same way. Stats gives income its own chart, splitting the month into slices in the colours you chose, next to a bar for every day of the month, standing at zero on the days nothing came in. The cash flow view then joins the two halves up, tracing what came from which source through to what it was spent on.

Fold income into the expense list and that breakdown has nothing left to group by. You would get one number a month with no way to ask how much of it was salary and how much was the invoice that finally cleared.

On imported rows

An import can suggest a source. Your sources go along with the statement, archived ones excluded. An incoming row comes back as a draft with one of them proposed, so a salary that lands on the same day each month tends to arrive already labelled.

Like every other field on a draft, it is a proposal rather than a decision. Change it or clear it before you publish; nothing is committed to your record until then.