Dealing with transfers in PocketSmith
To ensure that transfers are dealt with accurately in PocketSmith, it’s best to assign transfer transactions to categories that are set up to specifically deal with transfers.
Examples of transfer transactions might be credit card repayments, mortgage and loan repayments, setting aside savings, or moving funds to access them from a different account.
In this user guide
Reasons to create a transfer category
We recommend transfer transactions are assigned to their own transfer category. Setting up transfer categories in PocketSmith will affect the following:
Reporting
This changes the way a category is displayed by removing it from the Earning and Spending chart on your Dashboard, the Digest page, and the Income & Expense statement.
Budgeting
It will also remove any budgeted transfer categories from totals on the Budget page summary, as well as the overall figure on the Trends page.
Transfer marking
All transactions assigned to your transfer category will be marked as transfers and displayed with the transfer icon so they are easy to recognize within your PocketSmith account.
If you change one of your categories that already has transactions assigned to it, to be a transfer category, you'll have the option to treat any existing transactions as transfers too. Learn how to set up a transfer category below.
Note
PocketSmith will also try to automatically recognize transfer transactions and add the transfer icon to them even if they do not belong to a transfer category. Learn more about this feature in the following user guide: Transfer marking in PocketSmith
Preventing double-ups of expenses
Using transfer categories is especially useful in order to prevent double-ups of expenses in your reporting, and so that your forecast is accurate. Here are some examples:
- Credit card repayment transfers
When you are repaying a credit card purchase and don't want to count the repayment of a credit card purchase as an expense - Mortgage and loan repayment transfers
When you have a loan account, the interest transaction out of your loan account represents the expense, not the loan repayment. Assigning loan repayments to a transfer category means that the amount you actually pay off your mortgage (mortgage payment less interest payment) will reduce the loan amount, even though the net worth amount does not change. - Savings transfers
When you transfer money to a savings account, these funds still contribute to your net worth and so they aren't actually expenses, but a transfer of your positive funds from one account to another
If you want to show transfers in a different way, please get in touch and we’d be happy to help.
Steps to create a transfer category
Transfer categories are easy to set up - just follow the steps below:
Types of transfer categories
You can set up as many transfer categories as you like, but it's best to separate your transfers into categories that make sense to you. For example, if you want to budget for your savings and mortgage repayments, then it's best to have two different transfer categories for these.
Here are some examples of transfer categories that some of our users like to use:
Transfers between accounts
- Transfers between accounts
- General Transfers
- Account Transfer
Credit Card repayments
- Credit card transfer
- Credit card repayment
Mortgage and loan repayments
- Mortgage repayments
- Loan repayments
- Mortgage
- Loan
- Property
- Mortgage transfer
- Loan transfer
Savings
- Savings
- Joint savings
- Savings (transfer)
- Holiday Savings
You can quickly see which of your categories are set up as transfer categories on the Categories page by the transfer icon beside the name.
Note
If you have Automatic categorization of transactions from the bank feed turned on, then some of your categories will likely be ones created for you by our bank feed service.
By default, the following bank feed categories will be automatically set up as transfer categories:
- Transfers
- Credit Card Payments
- Mortgages
- Loans
- Savings
Assigning transactions to a transfer category
We recommend having both accounts that a transfer moves between set up within PocketSmith.
When transferring money between accounts, as long as both accounts exist within PocketSmith, two transactions should be imported into PocketSmith - the debit transaction leaving one account, and the credit transaction entering the another. You will need to assign both 'sides' of a transfer transaction to the same transfer category. This applies for both bank feed accounts and manually-updated accounts.
Removing transfer categories from different reports, pages, and areas of PocketSmith
Once a transfer category is set up, the category and all its transactions are automatically removed from most areas of PocketSmith reporting. This is useful so that transfers between your accounts aren't counted as income or an expense.
Alert
Please note that transfers are not automatically removed from the Cashflows page and the Transactions pie chart. For detail on how to exclude transfers from these areas please see:
Transactions pie chart:
In order for transfer transactions to be removed from the pie chart on the Transactions page, head Removing transfers from the transactions pie chart.
Cashflows page:
Transfer categories can be manually removed from Cashflows page by hiding them. Learn how to do this here: Hiding or restoring a category on the Cashflows statement
Automatic removal of transfers
Transfer categories are automatically removed from the following reports and pages:
- The Earning and Spending chart on the Dashboard
- The Digest page
- The Income & Expense Statement
- The Summary at the top of the Budget page
- The Trends page
The Income and Expense Statement
By default, transfers are removed from this page, but you can easily toggle between displaying and hiding transfers on the Income and Expense statement!
The Budget page
The Trends page
The overall budgeted figures that are displayed when first landing on Trends page, will exclude transfers. But you can still analyze your transfer categories by selecting them from the left panel.
Reverting a transfer category to a regular category
You can change a transfer category back to a regular income or expense category at any time by editing the category and de-selecting the option This is a transfer category.
Following this, you'll be given the additional option Unmark transactions already assigned to this category to no longer be transfers.
It's important to consider this option because if it is left unchecked, all transactions within the category will still be marked with the transfer icon.