Accounts and transactions
The three kinds of entry, what each one does to the books, and why a transfer isn't two transactions.
Everything in the ledger is one of three kinds of entry. Which one you choose decides what happens to the books, so it’s worth two minutes.
Accounts
An account is somewhere money sits: a checking account, a savings account, a credit card, a loan, cash in a drawer, a wallet. Each has one currency, an opening date and an opening balance.
A card or a loan opens negative. For a credit card with $500 outstanding, choose Amount owed and enter 500 as the starting amount. The account opens at -$500, because that’s money you owe rather than money you hold.
The opening balance isn’t a number kept outside the ledger. It posts against an equity account, so the books net to zero from the first day rather than starting from a figure nothing explains.
The three entries
| Entry | What it does |
|---|---|
| Deposit | Money arrives in one of your accounts, from outside. |
| Withdrawal | Money leaves one of your accounts, to outside. |
| Transfer | Money moves between two accounts you hold. Between currencies, it records both amounts and applies no rate. |
Categories, and refunds
A deposit normally counts as income and a withdrawal as spending. The category overrides that when it contradicts it.
Money coming back into a spending category is a refund, not income. You enter it as a deposit under that spending category, and it lowers that spending instead of counting as income. The mirror holds for money going back out of an income category: it lowers that income instead of counting as spending.
When you name a category that doesn’t exist yet, the form asks what kind it is, because the direction alone gets a refund wrong. On a deposit the choice is Money you earned or A refund of money you spent.
This is why naming the category matters more than it looks. The direction of the money says what happened at the bank; the category says what it meant.
Splits
One receipt can cover several categories. A split cuts the counter-account side of an entry into legs, each attributed on its own, and the legs add up to the total because that’s the same zero-sum check every entry gets.
A transfer has no counter-account side, so a transfer is never split.
Corrections
Postings are append-only. Editing an entry works out the difference and appends only that; nothing is overwritten and nothing is lost. An edit that changes nothing about the movement writes nothing at all.
Deleting voids an entry by posting its reversal. Nothing filters deleted entries out of a balance, because a voided entry already nets to zero, which is why a deleted entry can’t quietly change a total.
Dates in the future
Money dated in the future hasn’t moved. It counts toward no balance and no cash flow until its date arrives, and a summary stops at today in your own timezone whatever end date you ask for.