Guides

Transfers and duplicates: counting money once

When you review more than one account, the same money can appear twice. A transfer from checking to savings is money out of one file and money in to the other. A card payment leaves your bank account and also appears as a payment on the card statement. If both rows count as spending, your totals grow without you spending anything.

How StatementLens marks transfers

A row becomes a transfer candidate when either:

• its description contains wording such as "transfer", "xfer", "to savings", "from checking", "payment thank you" or "credit card payment", or
• it has an exact opposite amount on another row within three days, and one of the two descriptions looks like a transfer, deposit or withdrawal.

Payments to a merchant ("card payment to", "autopay", "online payment to") are not treated as transfers: they are usually real spending. The Transfers category is only given automatically for wording that clearly means your own accounts, such as "transfer to savings" or "payment thank you"; everything else keeps a merchant category or stays Uncategorized.

Candidates stay in the list and stay counted until you untick "Count". That is deliberate: a transfer to a friend is real spending, and only you know which accounts are yours.

A practical rule

1. If you load only your bank account, keep card payments counted. They are the moment that money left the account, even though the actual purchases happened on the card.
2. If you load both the bank account and the card, untick the card payment on one side (usually the bank side) and keep the individual card purchases. Otherwise each purchase is counted once on the card and again inside the payment.
3. Untick transfers between your own accounts on both sides. They are neither income nor spending.

Duplicates

A duplicate candidate is a row with the same date, the same amount and the same description (ignoring letter case and spacing) as another row. This catches overlapping exports, such as a March file and a "last 90 days" file that both include March, and the same PDF opened twice.

It also catches real repeated purchases: two identical bus fares on the same day are both genuine. StatementLens never removes a duplicate on its own. Open the original row with "Show original" and compare the source: if both rows come from different files covering the same dates, untick one. If they come from the same file and the statement really lists two charges, keep both.

Refunds and reversals

A refund can look like a transfer because it is the opposite amount of an earlier row. StatementLens labels positive rows with words like "refund" or "reversal" as Refunds instead of income. Move a refund into the category of the original purchase if you want that category's total to be net of it.

Recurring charges

A charge is listed as a recurring candidate when the same merchant appears as money out in at least three different months with amounts within about 10% of each other. Card numbers and reference digits are ignored when comparing names. Load at least three months to see these.