Transfers

A transfer is money moving between two accounts you own. Checking to savings. Checking to the credit card to pay the bill. Cash withdrawal from a checking account. None of these are spending or income — they're just dollars relocating within your own balance sheet.

How to enter one

On Register, click Transfer. Pick:

• From — the source account
• To — the destination account
• Amount — always positive; direction is implied by from/to
• Date — when the money actually moved (transfers can have separate post dates on the two ends, but use one date here)
• Memo — optional

When you save, Project Budget creates two paired entries:

• Source: -$X
• Destination: +$X

The two are linked. Editing one updates the other. Deleting one deletes both. The category for both sides is Transfer to/from [account name] — automatic, not selectable.

What transfers do to the budget

For two on-budget accounts (checking → savings), nothing changes in Ready to Assign, category Available, or net worth. You moved cash from one envelope-eligible bucket to another. No category is touched.

For on-budget → credit card (paying a card), the source account drops, the card account rises (less debt), and the Credit Card Payment category's Available drops by the payment amount — cash that was earmarked is now spent. See Credit-card workflow.

For on-budget → tracking (moving cash to a 401k contribution that's a tracking-asset account), the source account drops and the tracking account rises. Ready to Assign drops too, because the cash left an on-budget account. This is the right behavior — you no longer have those dollars to spend.

For tracking → on-budget (moving cash out of a brokerage to checking), the tracking account drops and the on-budget account rises. Ready to Assign rises by the transferred amount.

What transfers are not

• Not income. A transfer doesn't add to RTA unless one end is a tracking account.
• Not spending. A transfer doesn't show up on the Spending by category report.
• Not a way to "hide" money. Reports still walk every transaction, and the Net worth view sums everything.

Common transfer scenarios

Paying yourself back from savings. You used the credit card for an emergency that should come from the emergency fund. Transfer the amount from savings to checking, then make the credit-card payment. Two transfers, both clean.

Moving cash from one bank to another. Transfer; both accounts visible in Project Budget.

Sending money via Venmo / Zelle to a friend. Not a transfer. That's an outflow to a friend (use a Gifts or Reimbursements category). The friend is not your account.

Receiving money via Venmo / Zelle from a friend. Not a transfer either. That's an inflow categorized to whatever the money was for — if they paid you back for dinner, category it to Dining out as a positive (refilling the envelope), not to Ready to Assign.

Transfers in imports

Most bank exports send the two sides of a transfer as two separate rows in two separate account files. The Project Budget importer doesn't automatically pair them — you'll get two single-sided entries that look like spending and income.

See Importing transfers for the cleanup pattern.

Editing or deleting

Editing one side of a transfer updates the other. The fields that propagate: amount, date, memo. The category doesn't propagate — it's locked on both sides.

Deleting one side prompts to delete both. Picking Delete just this side breaks the pair and leaves the other side as an orphan single-sided transaction — usually a mistake. Only do this if you genuinely meant the two sides as independent entries that happened to be the same amount.