Transfers Between Accounts

How to link transfers between your own accounts in Forbidden Finance, including auto-detection, manual linking, budget exclusion, and delete behavior.

Overview

A transfer is a movement of money between your own accounts -- like moving $500 from checking to savings. Transfers are not real spending or income; they are just money changing location. Forbidden Finance recognizes this distinction and automatically excludes transfers from your budget calculations and spending reports, so your numbers reflect actual income and expenses only.

Transfers are represented as a linked pair: one outgoing transaction (negative amount on the source account) and one incoming transaction (positive amount on the destination account). You can link them manually or let Forbidden Finance detect them automatically.

How Auto-Detection Works

When Forbidden Finance sees two transactions on the same day with equal and opposite amounts on different accounts owned by you, it suggests linking them as a transfer. For example:

Chase Checking: -$500.00 on March 5
Ally Savings: +$500.00 on March 5

A notification appears asking if this is a transfer between your accounts. Tap Yes to link them, or No to leave them as separate transactions.

Auto-detection works with both bank-synced and manually entered transactions.

How to Manually Link a Transfer

If Forbidden Finance does not auto-detect a transfer (perhaps the dates are a day apart due to processing times), you can link them yourself.

Open the outgoing transaction

Find the transaction that represents money leaving the source account (the negative amount) and tap it.

Tap Link Transfer

In the transaction detail view, tap Link Transfer. A list of candidate transactions appears, showing recent transactions on other accounts with matching or similar amounts.

Select the matching transaction

Find the incoming transaction on the destination account and tap it. Forbidden Finance links the two transactions as a transfer pair.

Confirm

Review the transfer summary showing the source account, destination account, and amount. Tap Confirm to save the link.

Key Details

Budget exclusion: Transfer transactions are automatically excluded from all budget calculations, spending totals, and income reports. This prevents internal money movements from inflating your spending or income numbers.
Single display: In your transaction list, transfers show a transfer icon and label so you can easily distinguish them from regular transactions.
Delete behavior: When you delete one side of a transfer, the other side is deleted as well. You cannot delete just one half of a transfer pair.
Unlinking: If you linked two transactions by mistake, open either transaction and tap Unlink Transfer. Both transactions revert to independent, non-transfer transactions and become eligible for budget calculations again.
Cross-currency transfers: If you transfer between accounts in different currencies (available on Starter and above), each side of the transfer records the amount in its account's currency.

Tips

If auto-detection suggests a transfer that is not actually one (for example, you paid a friend $50 and coincidentally received $50 from someone else the same day), tap No on the suggestion to dismiss it.

Credit card payments typically show as a transfer from your checking account to your credit card account. Linking them as transfers keeps your budget clean, since the individual charges on your credit card are already tracked as expenses.

Transfers are excluded from budgets entirely. If you are using transfers to fund a savings goal, make sure you are tracking goal progress through account balances or manual contributions, not through transaction categorization.