{"id":"concept:bank-transaction","kind":"concept","label":"Bank Transaction","synonyms":["imported transaction","statement line"],"definition":"A bank transaction is a single imported row from a bank or credit-card statement — a date, an amount, and a description — that sits unposted in the inbox until it's categorized.","summary":"One row from an imported statement, following the owner's-perspective sign convention: a deposit is positive, a purchase or a card charge is negative. It starts life unposted, and stays that way — invisible to every report except list_transactions — until categorizing it turns it into a real journal entry.","explanation":["A bank transaction is what a real financial event looks like once it's been extracted from a bank or card statement and imported: a date, an amount in cents, and a description, tied to one specific connected bank account. Every bank transaction starts life with status \"unposted\" — sitting in the inbox, visible to list_transactions, but with no accounting effect until it's categorized.","The sign convention is worth knowing precisely: amounts are always from the account holder's own perspective. A deposit is positive; a debit-card purchase is negative. For a credit card specifically, a purchase is negative and a payment to the card is positive, which is why a card's own running balance reads as a negative number throughout BalanceMCP — it represents money owed, not money held. Getting this backwards on the way in makes every downstream report read the opposite of reality.","Once categorized, a bank transaction's status flips to \"posted\" and it carries a reference to the journal entry it became — that link is what lets a reversal find its way back to the original transaction and release it to \"unposted\" again if the categorization needs correcting. A bank transaction is never edited in place the way a spreadsheet cell would be; its status and the entry it's tied to change, but the transaction record itself stays put.","A bank transaction is distinct from a refund, even though both can look similar in a list: a refund is a brand-new transaction, its own row with its own date and amount, reversing the effect of an earlier charge — not a correction applied to the original row."],"commonMistakes":["Entering a credit card purchase as a positive amount — the owner's-perspective convention makes a card charge negative, the opposite of the statement's printed sign in some formats.","Assuming an imported bank transaction is already part of the books — it has no accounting effect until it's actually categorized into a journal entry.","Confusing a refund (a brand-new transaction) with correcting a bank transaction's own categorization (which happens through reversing the resulting entry, not editing the transaction)."],"category":"transactions","questions":[{"question":"Why is my credit card purchase shown as a negative number?","answer":"Amounts follow the owner's-perspective convention throughout BalanceMCP: a card charge increases what's owed, so it's recorded as negative, consistent with the card's overall balance also reading negative."},{"question":"Does an imported bank transaction already count in my reports?","answer":"No — it sits unposted, with no accounting effect, until it's actually categorized into a journal entry. Only categorized (posted) transactions show up in reports like the P&L."}],"url":"/glossary/bank-transaction","relatedTo":[{"id":"concept:transaction","relationship":"related","weight":0.9,"api":"/api/knowledge/concept%3Atransaction"},{"id":"concept:statement-import","relationship":"related","weight":0.9,"api":"/api/knowledge/concept%3Astatement-import"},{"id":"concept:categorization","relationship":"related","weight":0.9,"api":"/api/knowledge/concept%3Acategorization"},{"id":"concept:uncategorized-transaction","relationship":"related","weight":0.9,"api":"/api/knowledge/concept%3Auncategorized-transaction"},{"id":"concept:duplicate-transaction","relationship":"related","weight":0.9,"api":"/api/knowledge/concept%3Aduplicate-transaction"},{"id":"concept:cleared-transaction","relationship":"related","weight":0.9,"api":"/api/knowledge/concept%3Acleared-transaction"},{"id":"concept:refund","relationship":"related","weight":0.9,"api":"/api/knowledge/concept%3Arefund"},{"id":"tool:list_transactions","relationship":"references","weight":0.7,"api":"/api/knowledge/tool%3Alist_transactions"},{"id":"tool:import_statement","relationship":"references","weight":0.7,"api":"/api/knowledge/tool%3Aimport_statement"}],"referencedBy":[{"id":"concept:cash-basis","label":"Cash Basis","url":"/glossary/cash-basis"},{"id":"concept:transaction","label":"Transaction","url":"/glossary/transaction"},{"id":"concept:categorization","label":"Categorization","url":"/glossary/categorization"},{"id":"concept:split-transaction","label":"Split Transaction","url":"/glossary/split-transaction"},{"id":"concept:refund","label":"Refund","url":"/glossary/refund"},{"id":"concept:reversing-entry","label":"Reversing Entry","url":"/glossary/reversing-entry"},{"id":"concept:uncategorized-transaction","label":"Uncategorized Transaction","url":"/glossary/uncategorized-transaction"},{"id":"concept:duplicate-transaction","label":"Duplicate Transaction","url":"/glossary/duplicate-transaction"},{"id":"concept:bank-account","label":"Bank Account","url":"/glossary/bank-account"},{"id":"concept:bank-statement","label":"Bank Statement","url":"/glossary/bank-statement"},{"id":"concept:bank-feed","label":"Bank Feed","url":"/glossary/bank-feed"},{"id":"concept:cleared-transaction","label":"Cleared Transaction","url":"/glossary/cleared-transaction"},{"id":"tool:import_statement","label":"Import a bank statement without a manual data-entry pass","url":"/tools/import_statement"}],"license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","attribution":"BalanceMCP — https://balancemcp.com"}