Warning: That budgeting app I swore by for 2 years was double counting my transfers

I finally sat down with a spreadsheet last Sunday and found out my "savings" numbers were padded by about $400 because it was counting money I moved between accounts as income. Has anyone else caught their tracking software doing something dumb like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

blairsanchez2d ago

Double counting is a classic problem with those apps. A lot of them treat a transfer from checking to savings as both an expense leaving one account and income arriving in the other. I had the same issue with an app a few years back that kept showing I had $300 more than I actually did because it counted my paycheck twice once when it hit my main account and again when I moved a chunk to my emergency fund. You really have to dig into the settings and look for an option to mark transfers as internal moves. Otherwise the app just sees every dollar that shows up as new money.

emma_hart1d ago

Right, that paycheck double count is infuriating. I caught my app doing the same thing with my side hustle money. You have to find that "categorize transfer" or "internal transfer" toggle, sometimes it's buried in the account settings for each specific account. I wasted an afternoon once because my net worth graph showed a big spike from moving money into a high yield account, then I realized it was just the same cash counted in two places.