Add, edit, and split a transaction

Most of your transactions arrive through imports. This page covers what you do with them after that: editing what came in wrong, entering something manually, and splitting a single charge across multiple categories.

stateDiagram-v2
  [*] --> Uncleared: imported or entered
  Uncleared --> Cleared: you confirm it on your bank's site
  Cleared --> Reconciled: reconciliation closes

A transaction moves through three states from import to reconciliation. Reaching reconciled doesn’t lock it — see Edit an existing transaction .

Add a transaction manually

To add a transaction without importing it — cash spending, a check you wrote, an adjustment — click + Add transaction above the register, or press N.

Fill in:

• Date. Default is today. Change it if the transaction happened on a different date.
• Payee. Start typing and PennyBolt shows matching payees. Pick an existing one or type a new name. If you type a new name, PennyBolt creates a payee.
• Category. Required. Start typing or browse the category tree.
• Amount. Enter the amount. Use a negative number for expenses (money going out), positive for income (money coming in). For credit card accounts, purchases are positive (they increase the balance you owe).
• Memo. Optional. A note to yourself about the transaction.

Press Enter or click Save.

Edit an existing transaction

Click any transaction in the register to open it. Change any field and press Enter or click Save. Payee, category, date, amount, and memo are all editable.

Reconciled transactions stay editable, and there is no lock to undo first. Cleaning up a payee, a category, or a memo is ordinary bookkeeping — those fields don’t touch the amount, the date, or the cleared mark you verified against your bank, so they can’t disturb a reconciliation. Do it whenever you notice something, on any transaction, however old.

Changing the amount or date of a reconciled transaction is different: those are the exact values you checked against your statement. PennyBolt stops and asks before saving one, naming what you’re about to change, and you confirm or cancel. Nothing is written until you confirm.

Filter the register

The search box above the register accepts payee, category, memo, and amount queries.

• Type letters (Trader, groceries) to match payees, categories, memos, or the original imported descriptions.
• Type a number to find transactions by amount. The accepted forms are:
  • 214.73 — exactly $214.73, either direction
  • $214.73 — same, dollar sign tolerated
  • 214 — exactly $214.00 (no decimals means whole dollars)
  • -214.73 — money out of the account only
  • +214.73 — money in only
  • 1,234.56 — commas tolerated as thousands separators

Anything containing a letter falls through to text search, so your existing payee and memo searches still work exactly as before. Amount search is the right tool when you know a number and not much else — hunting down a $214.73 discrepancy, say, without remembering who it was paid to.

Split a transaction

A split lets you assign portions of one transaction to different categories — a Target run that covered groceries, household supplies, and clothing, for example.

To split a transaction:

1. Open it in the register.
2. Click Split.
3. Add a row for each category, with the amount for that portion.
4. The amounts must add up to the transaction total. PennyBolt shows the running difference so you know when they balance.
5. Click Save.

To unsplit a transaction, open it, delete all but one split line, and save.

Delete a transaction

Open the transaction and click Delete. Deleted transactions cannot be recovered. If you imported the transaction from a bank download, you can re-import the file — duplicate detection will skip it, but you can override that if needed. See Re-importing safely .

See also

• Transactions — the fields each transaction has.
• Reconcile an account — what cleared and reconciled status mean in practice.
• Payee rules — let rules assign categories automatically instead of doing it by hand.