Logging a transaction

Portfolio › Transactions is the ledger, and it is the section that does the real work. Nothing else in the Portfolio has a figure until something is in here. Every evaluation fee, reset, payout, subscription and platform charge is a row you write, because none of them is a fill and no broker will hand them to you.

Where the drawer opens from

The Add transaction button in the ledger’s own toolbar, or the + on a platform row inside the accounts drawer. The second route pre-selects that platform, which is worth using — it is the difference between picking a firm from a menu and having the row already know which relationship it belongs to.

The fields, in the order it asks them

1. 1Account — which platform this movement belongs to.
2. 2Type — Earning or Expense. This is the first question because it is the one that decides everything below it.
3. 3Category — the kind of earning or expense, scoped to the answer above. Twelve exist in total and the menu only ever shows you the half that applies.
4. 4Method — ACH, Wire, Card, Internal or Crypto — how the money actually travelled. Crypto is the one the ledger cannot store under its own name yet, so a row saved with it reads back as Other.
5. 5Amount — entered unsigned. The sign comes from the category, and the hint under the field tells you which way the row will be recorded before you commit to it.
6. 6Fee — the processing cost, if any, also unsigned. A fee is always subtracted. Leave it blank when there was none — the ledger prints a dash for that rather than a zero.
7. 7Status — Success, Pending or Failed. This one matters more than it looks; see below.
8. 8Duplicate transaction — a count. It records the row that many times as separate entries, which is how you enter twelve months of the same subscription in one go.
9. 9Date & time, and Notes — the moment it moved, and whatever it needs remembering by.

The twelve categories

• Earnings — Payout and Profit. Payout is money a firm actually sent you; Profit is a result you are logging against the relationship. Profit is the one type that can be entered either way, because a losing session has to be representable.
• Expenses — Platform fee, Eval reset, Subscription, Market data, Software, Education, Tools and Tax. All eight are costs, so all eight are recorded as money out.
• Transfers — Deposit and Withdrawal. They exist in the ledger and are never counted as earnings or as expenses — moving a payout to your bank is the same dollars changing location, and counting it as a cost would turn every payout you banked into a matching loss.

Transfers are deliberately not offered in the form, which is why the Type control has two options rather than three. A deposit or a withdrawal is money moving between two places you already own, and typing one in by hand is the fastest way to have the same dollars counted twice.

What the row carries once it is saved

• A reference — like TXN-0001, minted in order and without gaps. It is the string to quote if you ever need to ask us about a row.
• Net — the amount plus the fee — what actually reached or left the account. It is computed once and stored, so the Net column, the sort and every total that reads it can never disagree.
• A day it is filed under — frozen at the moment you save it, in your own timezone. That is why the ledger, the calendar, the month buckets and the cash-flow chart can never put the same movement on two different days.

The date picker will not accept a future date. Money that has not moved yet is a plan rather than a transaction, and a ledger that takes plans stops reconciling with anything.

Correcting one

Editing opens the same drawer, pre-filled, and saves as a correction to the same row — it keeps its id, its reference and its place in every total that already counted it. The drawer stays open until the server has answered, so a rejection leaves everything you typed standing rather than losing the form to a dropped connection.

Only rows you typed can be edited or deleted. A transaction generated from a closed trade, or one that arrived from a broker, says so and refuses — correcting those means correcting the thing they came from.

Three controls reach the server today: Add transaction in the ledger’s toolbar, and Edit and Delete in a row’s own menu. The Duplicate, Delete and Edit transaction buttons inside the row details drawer do not persist yet — they change what is on screen and nothing else, so use the row menu and the toolbar for anything you want to keep.

Finding a row again

The search box matches seven things: the account name, the broker, the type and its category, the method, the reference and your note. It deliberately does not search dates, amounts or status, so typing “pending” finds nothing — that is what the Filters popover is for.

• Filters — Type, Account, Status and an amount range, applied together on a footer button rather than one tick at a time.
• The amount range — filters on size, not on sign — “between $100 and $500” means the same thing about a fee as about a payout, so you never have to type a minus.
• Columns — grouped as Transaction, Activity, Amount and Meta, with Account, Date and Type always on. There are presets, and page sizes of 10, 25 and 50.

Clicking a row opens it in full. Its headline figure is the NET rather than the amount, which is the honest one — a $450 payout that arrived as $425 leads with $425, and the three figures are listed separately underneath.