Cash flow counts money that moved

v0.1.22

🏦 Hiding a transaction from your spending chart no longer takes it out of your cash flow, and accounts we can't identify are named on screen instead of guessed at.

  • Cash flow counts money that moved: In and Out now include every transaction on an account that holds your money, whether or not you've hidden it from your spending chart.

Why we built it: Hiding a row is a statement about your spending, and cash flow asks a different question. Rent landing in your checking account moved money whether or not you want it counted as spending, and it was quietly dropping out of In with nothing on screen to tell you.

What you can do

  • See money you'd hidden from spending: a transaction you hid, or one in a category you've told Spend to ignore, now counts toward In and Out and shows up in the cash flow view. It looks like every other row there, because whether you hid it from a chart says nothing about whether the money moved.
  • Keep Spend exactly as it was: the Hide from spending switch does the same thing it always did, and your spending chart still leaves those rows out. Only cash flow changed.
  • Find out when an account isn't being counted: if we can't tell what kind of account something is, the cash flow view now says so underneath the transactions and names the account, instead of quietly leaving it out of the figures.
  • Tell us what kind of account it is: open Accounts, edit an account you added yourself, and pick Checking or savings, Credit card, Loan or mortgage, or Investment. It starts counting straight away.
  • Trust the figures on cards and loans: paying off a credit card or a mortgage is money leaving you, and it's counted that way. It's never counted as money arriving, which is what could happen when we had to guess what an account was.

Good to know

  • Your In and Out may both go up: if you'd been hiding transactions from your spending chart, those months will read higher now. Nothing new happened. Those figures were leaving money out.
  • Accounts you import from a spreadsheet start out unidentified: we don't ask what kind of account a file belongs to yet, so a freshly imported account is left out of cash flow and named on screen until you set its kind. We'd rather show you a gap you can close than a number that's quietly wrong.
  • If the account is also linked to your bank, merge it instead: on Accounts you'll see a suggested match when an imported account looks like one you've connected. Merging puts the history in one place and takes care of the account kind for you, which is usually better than setting the kind on both.
  • Your bank decides the kind for connected accounts: you can only set this on accounts you added yourself. For a linked account the answer comes from the bank, and your next sync would overwrite anything you picked.