Track money

Transactions

Every money movement in TallyFolio is a transaction. Learn the types, the statuses, and how to keep them categorized.

Last updated 2026-09-11

Use this page to record, find, and clean up every money movement in your ledger — purchases, paycheques, refunds, transfers, contributions, and card payments. It opens straight onto the ledger; there is no tab to click first.

You enter amounts as plain positive numbers. Behind the scenes, money leaving is kept as a negative amount and money arriving as a positive one — the transaction type decides the direction, so you never manage signs yourself.

Before you start

The account the money moved through must exist and be active.
Skim your categories in Settings first — categorizing correctly as you go is far easier than a cleanup later.
Know the type distinctions below; the type decides how each movement is counted everywhere else.

Transaction types

Type	How it's counted
Expense	Money out for goods and services. This is what counts as spending.
Income	Money in. This is what counts as income.
Refund	Money back for a purchase. Tracked separately so it never inflates income.
Reimbursement	Money returned to you, like an employer expense repayment. Also kept separate from income — and the original expense stays intact.
Transfer	Money moving between your own accounts, including credit-card payments. Never income, never spending — your total money didn't change. Transfer rows show both the source and destination account so the direction stays clear.
Investment contribution	Money into an investment account. Excluded from spending; tracked toward registered-plan room.

Statuses

Status	What it means
Posted	Real. It happened, it moves the balance, and reports count it.
Pending	Expected or not fully final yet. It moves the current balance but should be reviewed and posted once final.
Projected	Planning only — an entry you add by hand for money that hasn't moved yet. Never moves balances, never counts in budgets or reports.

Drafts to review

If you have connected an assistant or tool and allowed it to propose transactions, its proposals wait above the ledger as drafts. A draft is a suggestion and nothing more: it moves no balance, counts in no budget, report, or forecast, and stays out of your export until you confirm it.

Confirm opens the ordinary transaction form, filled in from the draft, so you can change anything before saving — saving is what records the transaction. Confirm selected does the same in one go, but only for drafts that already have a category and that nothing on your ledger looks like. Dismiss sets a draft aside, and the client that proposed it cannot propose the same thing again.

A draft marked as a possible duplicate matches a transaction already on the same account, for the same amount, within a few days. Open that one and check before confirming.

How to use it

Choose to add a transaction, or click one to edit it. Pick the account, type, amount, date, and category, and add a merchant or description so you can find it later.
Attach labels if the transaction belongs to a trip, project, or event.
Use the exclude-from-budget switch for a real expense that shouldn't count against budgets — it stays in your ledger either way.
When editing, TallyFolio can find similar transactions — others with the same merchant or description — and show how many match. Tick the fields you want copied to all of them and the change applies to the whole set at once, or not at all.
Only safe fields can be bulk-copied this way: category, the recurring flag, budget exclusion, transaction type, and account. Amount, date, merchant/description, notes, and status are never bulk-copied.
When a planned entry — projected or pending — has actually happened, use Mark as posted on its row menu, or in its details panel, to confirm it. The date and amount stay exactly as planned, so if the real charge differed, edit the row afterward. Tick several rows and the selection bar posts every planned one at once.
Use the URL-backed filters to narrow by dates, merchant or description, one or more accounts, categories, types, statuses, or labels, plus recurring state, budget inclusion, and absolute amount bounds. Reloading or paging keeps the same filters, and active filters appear as removable controls above the ledger.
The ledger opens on the current month. It shows as a This month pill above the table — remove the pill, press the This month button beside Filters, or pick All time in the date preset to see your whole history instead. That choice lives in the address, so reloading, paging, and sorting keep it.
The total line above the ledger — Matching, In, Out, Net — covers every transaction your filters match, not just the page you can see. It counts posted rows only, so transfers, pending, and projected amounts stay out of it.
If a matching amount needs currency conversion but no dated exchange rate exists, TallyFolio leaves it out of the total and says so, rather than assuming one-to-one. The total would otherwise read as complete when it is not.
Export the currently filtered list as a CSV file whenever you need it in a spreadsheet. The export uses the same filters and includes every matching page.

What affects this page

CSV imports add posted transactions in bulk.
Mark as posted turns a projected or pending entry into a posted one.
Editing or deleting a transaction immediately updates its account's balance.

What does not affect this page

Labels — they group and filter but never change a transaction's classification or amounts.
Budgets and reports — they read transactions; they never modify them.
Subscriptions — tracking a bill creates no transactions; its upcoming charges appear only in the forecast.
Assets — the register is separate from the ledger.

Common mistakes

Treating transfers as spending — or recording one as an expense plus an income. Moving money from chequing to savings doesn't change what you have. Use the transfer type with a destination account.
Marking reimbursements as income. They're tracked separately so your income history stays honest.
Expecting projected rows to count as actuals. They never enter budgets, reports, or balances until they become posted.
Recording a credit-card payment as an expense. The spending happened when you used the card; the payment is a transfer that settles the balance.

FAQ

Why did my account balance change when I edited a transaction?

Balances are calculated from the ledger, live. Changing an amount, account, or status flows straight into the balance — that's the design.

Which fields can "apply to similar" copy, and which can it never touch?

It can copy category, the recurring flag, budget exclusion, transaction type, and account. It never copies amount, date, merchant or description, notes, or status — those stay unique to each transaction.

Why doesn't a planned transaction show up in my reports?

Reports count only posted actuals. A planned entry joins them when you mark it as posted.

How do I fix a whole merchant's category at once?

Edit one transaction from that merchant, change the category, and tick the option to apply it to similar transactions. You'll see the match count before anything saves, and the update is all-or-nothing.

Where this lives in the app

Import CSV statements
Upload a statement file, map its columns once, review every row, and save the batch — nothing is written until you confirm.
The year grid
Read a whole year at once: categories down the side, months across the top, and the totals on the right.
Spending targets
Give a category a monthly target, then read the whole year against it in the grid.
Connect an MCP client
Let an assistant or tool you trust read your TallyFolio data over MCP, and propose transactions for you to confirm. Optional and off by default.