Skip to content
Open Net Worth Docs

Transactions and the ledger

What this solves

Every dollar in or out of an account is a transaction, recorded in that account’s register — the source of truth for your budget’s activity, net worth’s cash figure, and spending reports.

Add and edit a transaction

  1. Open an account from Accounts to see its register.
  2. Use the quick add row for a date, payee, category, and amount — expense, income, or transfer.
  3. Click a row for its detail drawer: edit any field, see full activity history, attach a receipt, or delete it.
  4. Split across categories (e.g. a $184.50 supermarket run, part groceries part household) from the split editor — amounts must total exactly.
  5. Filter/search by date, category, payee, account, cleared state, or free text.
  6. Mark cleared once posted at your bank — feeds reconciliation, separate from categorization.

A transaction with something unusual (new payee, ambiguous category) can be flagged needs review — an Approve/Reject banner replaces the normal edit controls. Approve clears the flag; reject deletes the transaction.

Transfers, splits, and adjustments

  • A transfer always has two legs (both accounts must exist, one may be archived) and stays in sync automatically.
  • A balance adjustment (from reconciling) never carries a category and is excluded from spending reports.
  • The Starting Balance transaction can’t be deleted, uncleared, freely edited, or merged — change the account’s opening balance instead.

What Lucius can do here

  • Add single or bulk transactions from a plain description, including transfers and splits.
  • Find and fix categorization mistakes, bulk-update transactions, explain a category.
  • Trace a transaction’s full audit history.
  • Find and merge likely duplicates, keeping the audit trail intact.
  • Attach or read a linked receipt.

Things that trip people up

  • Category is optional, not “uncategorized.” No category shows as “Unsorted” — Lucius won’t invent one for an unrecognized label; it asks or leaves it unsorted.
  • A foreign-currency amount locks at the recording date’s rate, not today’s. Net worth still floats current balances at today’s rate. See Base currency & FX.
  • Split lines must total exactly — off by a cent is rejected, not rounded.
  • Deleting an account is blocked while it has transactions — archive instead.
  • The register can show more rows than fit on screen — scroll or “load more.”