Changing a transaction

Almost everything about a transaction is yours to change, and changing one is not a correction of an error — it is how the thing is meant to work. What arrives from your bank is a starting point.

Open one and you can change

The category. The most common edit, and the one worth making stick with a rule — why a transaction landed in that category.

The merchant name. Banks send things like SQ *COFFEE 4411 LONDON GB. Rename it to what it actually was; SageFin remembers the tidy name for that merchant.

A note. Anything you will want to know in a year and will not remember. Notes are yours and do not affect any figure.

Tags. A second axis alongside categories — what tags are for.

Which business it belongs to, if you track one.

Splitting one across categories

A supermarket trip that was half groceries and half a birthday present is one transaction and two kinds of spending. Split it, and each part lands in its own category and its own budget. The total is unchanged — a split divides a transaction, it never alters what left your account.

Receipts do this for you when they can: an emailed or photographed receipt with line items can propose the split, so the common case needs no arithmetic from you at all.

Hiding one

Hiding takes a transaction out of budgets, reports and totals while leaving it in the list.

The honest use is a transaction that is real but would mislead a total — an internal transfer that looks like income, a reimbursement you have already accounted for. It is not a delete, and it should not be used as one: the money still moved, and hiding it means your reports and your bank will disagree by exactly that amount.

Marking one reviewed

A way of saying I have looked at this, so you can work through a month's transactions without losing your place. It changes no figures and nothing else depends on it.

Needs review is a view on the transactions page — switch to it from All transactions — that lists what is waiting for a look. Mark as reviewed on a transaction takes it off the list.

What lands there is the household's choice, in Settings → Preferences, and only an owner can change it:

• Mark new transactions as Needs Review flags everything that syncs in, for a household that wants to look at every transaction.
• Mark uncategorized transactions as Needs Review flags only what could not be categorized. That is decided after categorization runs, so a transaction that is categorized a moment after it arrives is never flagged.

Both apply only to transactions that sync in — ones you add by hand or import from a file have already been seen by whoever entered them. A rule can do better than either for one merchant: its Review status action marks matching transactions as reviewed, or as needing review, and wins over the household setting. If you want to hear when new ones need a look, that is an alert — see notifications.

Pending transactions

A charge often appears first as pending, while the amount can still change, and later as posted. Allow edits to pending transactions, also in Settings → Preferences, decides how pending ones are treated. Off, they are read-only and left out of budgets and cash flow until they post. On, you can edit them and they count everywhere. Either way, splitting waits until a transaction posts.

Your edits carry over when it posts. The one exception is a bank that reports the posted version as a separate transaction: then your edits come back only when exactly one posted transaction on the same account has the same amount within a week — and that one is marked for review. If none matches, or several do, the edits are lost. When a balance disagrees with your bank explains pending amounts themselves.

Adding one by hand

Cash mostly. Add transaction on the transactions page, and it behaves like any other — it categorizes, budgets and reports the same way. On a manual account it is the only way anything gets in.

The form takes a note as you fill it in, so a cash payment you will not recognise next month can carry its explanation from the start rather than waiting for you to open it again.

Doing it to several at once

Select several and change them together — editing multiple transactions in bulk, in one go: category, tags, hidden, reviewed. This is the tool for a newly connected account where fifty transactions from one merchant all want the same category, and it is much faster than a rule if you are only doing it once.

If you find yourself doing it a second time for the same merchant, write a rule instead. That is the signal.

Two things you might not find

Ask what a descriptor means. For the impenetrable ones — PAYPAL *8BXQ2 — SageFin can have a go at explaining what the statement text is actually referring to.

Ask it to categorize again. If you have since created a category that fits better, you can re-run categorization on a single transaction rather than editing it by hand.