Transfers, card payments, and exclusions

Not everything is spending

Some transactions move money around without actually spending it:

• Transfers between your own accounts (checking to savings, say).
• Credit-card payments — the monthly payment from your checking account to

your card.

These aren't expenses. If you counted them, your spending would look far bigger than it is. That's what the 🚫 Excluded (ignore) option is for.

What "Excluded" does

Mark a transaction 🚫 Excluded (ignore) — it's an option in every category dropdown — and the app leaves it out of every calculation: the summary table, the totals, the trend chart, and the forecast link. It's still there in your list (dimmed), just not counted.

You can reach for it anywhere you file a transaction: the review queue, the group-by-merchant view, the bulk-select dropdown, or a single row.

The app excludes the obvious ones for you

On import, the app automatically excludes transactions that look like card payments or transfers, so you usually start in good shape. It tells you how many it set aside. Still, check them: filter the transaction list to Category: 🚫 Excluded and confirm the right things landed there.

Exclude a whole category in one click

If an entire category is really transfers or payments — say you filed all your card payments under a "Card bill" category — filter the transaction list to that category and click 🚫 Exclude all. Every transaction in it moves to Excluded across all months at once, and that merchant will auto-exclude on future imports.

The double-counting trap (with an example)

This is the one thing to get right. Say in March you:

• Buy $2,000 of groceries, gas, and dinners on your credit card.
• Pay that card's $2,000 bill from your checking account.

Now you import both accounts:

• The credit card file lists the purchases — $2,000 of real spending.
• The checking file lists the payment — a $2,000 transfer to the card.

If you count both, the app thinks you spent $4,000 in March. You didn't — you spent $2,000. The purchases are the real spending; the payment is just you covering the bill.

The fix: exclude the card payment (the $2,000 line in checking), so only the purchases count. This is exactly what the app tries to do automatically — the example just shows *why*.

One rule to remember

Only exclude a card's payments if you've actually imported that card's purchases. If you imported checking but *not* the credit card, the card payment is the only record you have of that spending — excluding it would make the money vanish from your budget. Import the card too, then exclude the payment. When in doubt, import every account and let the automatic exclusions do the work.

See the glossary for definitions of transfer, payment, and exclusion.