Transfers and Double Entry
How to mark transactions as transfers and link them across accounts to prevent double-counting.
Moving Money Between Accounts
When you move money between your own accounts — like paying a credit card from chequing or transferring funds to savings — two transactions appear: one in each account. Without proper handling, these can inflate your spending and income totals.
What Transfers Look Like
A credit card payment of $500 creates:
- Chequing account: -$500 (money leaving)
- Credit card: -$500 (balance decreasing)
Neither of these is truly "spending" or "income" — it is just money moving from one pocket to another.
Auto-Detection and the Internal Transfers Page
NivoaFlow scans your transactions for matching pairs (e.g. a $500 withdrawal from chequing and a $500 deposit to your credit card a day later) and surfaces them on the Internal Transfers page. The page has two tabs:
- Needs Pairing — transactions we have flagged as transfers but have not paired with a counterpart yet. Open one to see suggested matches; if none of the suggestions are right, tap Show more to browse other unpaired candidates manually.
- Paired — confirmed pairs. You can Unpair here if we got it wrong.
If a suggestion is a false positive — say two unrelated charges that happen to share an amount — Dismiss it and we will leave it out of future suggestions.
Manually Marking a Transfer
You can also flag any transaction as a transfer from its detail view or via bulk actions. Transfers are excluded from spending, income, and recurring detection, and they do not count toward any budget category.
What Happens When You Mark a Transfer
- Budget impact: Transfers are excluded from budget tracking — they do not count toward any category
- Reports: Transfers are filtered out of spending and income reports by default
- Recurring detection: Transfers are skipped, so credit card payments and savings contributions do not clutter your bills list
- Net worth: Both sides cancel out, so your net worth is unaffected (as it should be)
Common Transfer Scenarios
| Scenario | Account 1 | Account 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Credit card payment | Chequing: -$500 | Credit Card: -$500 |
| Savings contribution | Chequing: -$200 | Savings: +$200 |
| Investment deposit | Chequing: -$1,000 | Investment: +$1,000 |
| Line of credit payment | Chequing: -$300 | Line of Credit: -$300 |
Tips
- Pair transfers in the Internal Transfers page so both sides are linked and reports stay clean
- Review the Needs Pairing tab periodically — bank descriptions sometimes make it hard to spot the matching transaction automatically
- Do not mark loan payments as transfers if you want to track debt repayment as a budget category — only use transfer marking for pure money movement between your own accounts
See understanding transactions for more on transaction types.