Refunds and credits — money coming back

A refund is not income

You return a $120 coat. The money lands back in your account, and it looks exactly like a deposit — but it isn't earnings. It's the reversal of something you already bought.

The app treats it that way. A refund is filed against the category the purchase came from, and it reduces what that category cost you. If March groceries were $800 and $120 of it came back, March groceries cost $680.

Counting that $120 as income instead would leave you with two wrong numbers at once: groceries still reading $800, and $120 of income you never earned.

Recording one by hand

On the Spending tab, open Record a payment I already made. The Type dropdown offers three choices:

• Expense — money you spent.
• Refund (money back) — money coming back on something you bought.
• Income — money you earned or received.

Type the amount as a plain positive number; the Type decides which way it goes. Pick the same category the original purchase was filed under, and the note under the form confirms what will happen — files as +$120 and reduces what its category cost.

How a refund looks

A refund shows as a credit: a green +$120, with a note on hover explaining that it's money back on a purchase rather than income.

In the tables that total a month up, ordinary spending prints plainly ($800) so it lines up with the Plan column beside it. Only a net credit — a category where the refunds outweighed the charges — is signed and coloured, so you can't misread money coming back as money going out. Hovering it explains that the refunds in that category outweighed the charges that month.

A category can genuinely go negative for a month. Buy a $250 appliance in January, return it in February, and February's total for that category is +$250. That's not an error; it's what happened.

A refund never changes your plan. Like every other transaction, it records what happened — your forecast keeps running on the expense lines under My Plan. See Your plan vs. your real spending.

Imported refunds — and what the app won't guess

When you import a statement, the app reads a credit as a refund only when the wording leaves no room for doubt — REFUND, CHARGEBACK, PURCHASE RETURN, MERCHANDISE RETURN, MERCHANT CREDIT, a reversed charge.

Everything else stays income for you to file, on purpose. A bank credit is just as often a deposit, a dividend, interest, a rebate or a bounced cheque — and a tax refund is not a return of anything this app recorded as spending. So IRS TAX REFUND, RETURN OF CAPITAL and RETURNED CHECK all stay as income even though they read like refunds.

The reasoning is deliberately one-sided: misreading a pension deposit as negative spending would quietly corrupt a category's totals, while leaving a credit for you to look at costs you a few seconds. Either way an imported row arrives uncategorized, so you'll find it in the transaction list, marked Uncategorized income, ready to file.

Card payments and transfers are never treated as refunds — those are set aside as excluded.

If something landed on the wrong side

• A credit came in as income, but it really was a refund. Use Remove on that row in the transaction list, then record it again with Type: Refund (money back) in the right category.
• It really was income (a dividend, a reimbursement from work) — just file it under an income category and leave it alone.
• It was a transfer or a card payment — mark it 🚫 Excluded (ignore).

Re-importing the same file later won't duplicate anything you already have; see duplicate detection in the glossary.

Next: seeing your spending trends over time.