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An import created duplicates

What you’d see

After importing a statement (or a linked source and a manual entry both recording the same purchase), the same real-world transaction appears twice.

Why it happens

Every import runs through a matching engine comparing incoming rows against your ledger — by amount, date, description, and account — before deciding new, likely duplicate, or worth a human’s judgment. Usually invisible. Two situations slip through by design:

  • A genuinely ambiguous match — same amount, close date, similar description, not certain enough to auto-merge — gets queued for your review.
  • A shape the engine doesn’t handle: one purchase your bank splits into multiple statement lines (or several settled as one line) can’t match your single ledger entry, so both land as separate rows until merged by hand. A known limitation, not a bug you’re hitting alone.

How to fix it

  1. Check the import screen first — a likely duplicate is flagged at upload, with a merge/skip/import-as-new decision per row before anything books.
  2. Already booked? Fix it from the account’s register: open the account, find the pair, and delete the row you don’t want. The register is the reliable path — the duplicate stays visible there with its date, payee and amount, so you can confirm which copy to keep before removing anything.
  3. A split-settlement case the engine can’t match — one payment arriving as two rows, or one row covering two real charges: merge the extra row into the correct one from the register, or delete it if it is a true duplicate.
  4. Roll back the whole import if a batch went badly. Imports are grouped, so the account’s statement history can undo the batch rather than making you unpick it row by row.

One protected transaction

You can’t merge an account’s Starting Balance transaction into anything else, or vice versa — a guard so a re-import can never corrupt what your account looked like when tracking began. Duplicate involving that row? Fix the starting balance directly instead. See Accounts and opening balances.

How to confirm it’s fixed

The duplicate no longer appears twice, and net worth / spending totals reflect it once. The Duplicate review panel shows “no duplicates to review” once clear.