When SparkReceipt extracts a bank statement, every transaction is classified by the direction of the money: money out (debits) is an expense and money in (credits) is income. That rule is right most of the time. Refunds, transfers between your own accounts and returned payments are the exceptions: money coming in that isn't really income, or lines that shouldn't be in your books at all. This article covers how to handle each case on a statement's Transactions page and in the Transaction Manager.
Nothing on a statement reaches your books until you match a line to a receipt or create an entry from it, so a line you leave alone never inflates your totals.
Changing a transaction's type
If the statement got the direction wrong, select the line(s), open More in the bulk action bar and use Set transaction type to mark them as expense or income yourself. Do this before you create entries from the lines. Set transaction type works on lines from uploaded statements. Lines from a connected bank account keep the direction your bank reported.
Refunds and returns
A refund arrives as money in, so it would count as income. For bookkeeping you usually want it to reduce your expenses instead. On a money-in transaction, open the actions menu:
- Mark as refund flags the credit as money back on an expense, so it books against expenses instead of counting as income. Use it when you have a refund receipt to link. In the match panel, Show refunds instead switches the search to your refund documents.
- Create refund flags the credit and creates a refund entry against your expenses in one step. Use it when there is no refund receipt.
- Not a refund clears the flag again.
For how refunds look in your reports, see Credits & Returns: How to Show Negative Expenses in SparkReceipt.
Transfers between your own accounts
A transfer from your savings to your checking account is neither income nor an expense, but on the statement it looks like money in or out. If you created entries from both sides of a transfer, your income and expenses would both be inflated.
Two clean ways to handle transfers:
- Mark them as transfers. Use Resolve as transfer on the line, or More → Mark as transfer to… for several lines, and pick the other account. If the other account isn't in the list, add it first. See Transfers, exclusions, and creating entries in the Transaction Manager.
- Delete the lines. If you prefer a tidy transaction list, select the transfer lines and use Delete (in More). This only removes the extracted line, not anything at your bank.
Returned and failed payments (NSF)
A bounced payment usually appears as a pair of lines: the original charge going out and the returned amount coming back in. Some banks print the returned amount as a dated row that repeats the balance above it. SparkReceipt removes that row during extraction when the statement's other rows move the balance by their amounts, so only the charge remains. If you do see both lines, the returned amount is not income. It cancels the charge. Either Exclude both lines, or create an expense from the original charge and record the returned amount as a refund in the same category so they cancel out. Any NSF fee the bank charged is a real expense, so use Create expense on it.
Credit card payments on a bank statement
If you bring in both a bank statement and the credit card statement it pays off, the card payment appears on both: as money out on the bank statement and money in on the card statement. The individual purchases are on the credit card statement, so counting the card payment as well would count everything twice. Mark the payment as a transfer to the card (SparkReceipt often suggests this with "Looks like a payment to" your card) and match or create entries from the purchase lines on the card statement instead. See Matching transactions to receipts in the Transaction Manager for more on credit-card payments.
Bank fees inside a purchase line
If the bank added a fee to a purchase and the statement shows them as one line, use Split line from the line's actions menu to pull the fee out into its own line. Then match the purchase to its receipt and use Create expense on the fee.
After fixing the types
Once the types are correct, work through the remaining lines: match them to receipts, or use Create expense, Create income or Create entries for the ones without a receipt. See Bank statement extraction: the complete guide.