Why aren't my bank statement transactions showing in my reports?

Your reports — the Cash Flow and Profit & Loss (P&L) widgets on the Overview screen — count your actual income and expense entries: receipts, invoices, and entries you create. They do not count the raw transaction lines on a bank statement. So a purchase that exists only as a statement line won't appear in Cash Flow or P&L until that line becomes an entry. This is deliberate, and this article explains why — and what to do so your transactions show up.

A statement is a source, not your finished books

Think of a bank statement as raw material, not the finished ledger. It's a list of everything that moved through your account, but a list of movements isn't the same as a record of your income and expenses. Your books are built from entries — a receipt for something you bought, an invoice for something you sold, or an entry you create by hand for a cost like a bank fee. Reports add up those entries.

That's why uploading a statement, or connecting a bank account, doesn't immediately change your totals. The transactions land in the Transaction Manager as work to reconcile, not as finished entries. Until you reconcile them, they're just source data waiting to be accounted for.

Why it works this way

Counting statement lines directly would be the obvious shortcut — but it would make your reports wrong in two important ways.

It would double-count nearly everything

The same purchase usually reaches SparkReceipt twice: once as the receipt or invoice (often forwarded straight from your email), and again as a line on your bank statement. If both were counted, every purchase you have a receipt for would be counted twice — the total on your reports would be inflated by exactly the amount you've been most careful to document.

SparkReceipt avoids this by counting each real event once. A statement line is either matched to an existing receipt — in which case the receipt is what counts — or turned into a new entry if no receipt exists. Either way, one event, one entry. The statement line itself never adds a second copy to your totals.

Much of a bank statement isn't income or expense at all

A large share of the lines on any statement aren't business income or costs — they're money moving around. Transfers between your own accounts, credit-card payments, moving money into savings, cash withdrawals. A bank line often can't tell on its own whether a deposit is real income or just money you shifted from another account.

If every line were counted automatically, that pass-through money would badly inflate both your income and your expenses — a credit-card payoff would look like a large expense, and the transfer that funded it would look like income, when neither is real. Reviewing each line first is what keeps this money out of your numbers.

What to do instead

Open the Transaction Manager (Transactions in the left-hand sidebar) and work through your transactions. For each one:

Match it to its receipt or invoice if you already have the document in SparkReceipt. The receipt is what counts toward your reports. See Matching transactions to receipts in the Transaction Manager.
Create an entry from the transaction if it's a genuine cost or income with no receipt — a bank fee, interest, an FX charge. This turns the line itself into an expense or income entry that flows into your reports. See Transfers, exclusions, and creating entries in the Transaction Manager.
Mark it as a transfer if it's money moving between your own accounts, so it's correctly kept out of your income and expenses.
Exclude it if it shouldn't count at all, like a personal purchase on a business card.

Only once a line becomes an entry — matched to a receipt, or created as its own expense or income — does it start counting in Cash Flow and P&L. Reviewing each line is also the moment you set the right category (for example, splitting a repair from an improvement) and the correct tax treatment, so your reports come out right the first time.

If your report looks empty or lower than expected

An empty or unexpectedly low report almost always means you have transactions that are still sitting as unreconciled statement lines rather than entries. Open the Transaction Manager, look at the Unmatched queue (the progress bar shows how much is left, for example "12 of 40 reconciled"), and match or create entries from what's there. As you work through them, the missing income and expenses appear in your reports.