Convert Income to Transfer — Clean Up Refunds
Refunds, reimbursements, and internal top-ups often land as income when they are really just money moving between accounts. Convert them to transfers in one tap and keep your income totals accurate.
Why refunds pollute income analytics
When a merchant refunds a purchase, the money reappears on your card as a positive transaction. Most expense trackers record it as income — which is technically accurate in a cash-flow sense but misleading for actual income analysis. A month where you returned a laptop and got paid your salary looks like you earned twice as much as usual. The same problem affects reimbursements from an employer, a friend paying back a shared dinner, or a cash withdrawal that you then deposited into a savings account.
The correct classification is a transfer: money moving from one source to another without representing net new income. Budgie lets you convert any income transaction to a transfer directly from the transaction detail screen. The income total drops immediately, the transfer pair links to the appropriate destination account if one matches, and your analytics reflect actual earned income again.
One tap, fully reversible
Open the income transaction, choose Convert to Transfer, and pick the destination account. Budgie creates the transfer pair and immediately recalculates affected statistics. If Budgie's transfer-pair detection already knows about a matching entry — an expense on the same day for the same amount on the source account — it consolidates both legs automatically rather than creating a duplicate.
The conversion is reversible: open the resulting transfer and convert it back to income at any time. No data is permanently altered; the operation is a reclassification that updates the type field and rebuilds the transfer link, not a deletion and re-creation.
What you get
Clean income totals — refunds and reimbursements move out of income into transfers in one tap
Fully reversible — convert back to income any time without losing data
Live analytics update — the income column recalculates the moment the conversion is confirmed
Pair-detection aware — auto-consolidates with a matching expense leg when one is found
Frequently Asked Questions
Why would I want to convert income to a transfer?
Can I undo the conversion?
Does this rebuild my analytics?
What if the matching transfer side already exists?
Related Features
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