Record a transfer

Moving money between two of your own wallets, what the form asks for, and why it is neither spending nor income.

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 a transfer takes no category and no budget. There is nothing to label it as, so the form does not ask for one.

Recording one

  1. In the add-transaction form, fill in the wallet the money is leaving, the currency and the 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 it takes the amount that left off the first wallet's balance and adds the received amount to the second.

Across currencies

The received amount is always asked for and always yours to type. SavingStat applies no rate of its own here: 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. Currencies explains why both figures are kept instead of one being converted away.

Why it matters

Filing a transfer as an expense counts money you still have as money you spent. Do it at both ends and the same move is counted twice, once as spending and once as income. Every category, budget and monthly figure downstream inherits it.

Recorded properly, it stays out of the way. A transfer creates neither an expense nor an income record, and the Stats pages are built from those two, so it cannot reach them. 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 is checked, and the row is refused without it.

The received amount 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 yourself while you are in there.