Bank Transaction
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.
In short
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.
Also called: imported transaction, statement line
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.
What people get wrong
- 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).
Common questions
- Why is my credit card purchase shown as a negative number?
- 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.
- Does an imported bank transaction already count in my reports?
- 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.
Machine-readable: /api/knowledge/concept:bank-transaction