A manual transaction is one you enter yourself rather than one that arrived from a bank: cash you spent, money someone paid you back, a transfer you want on the record. You can add one to any account.
Add one
Go to the Transactions page and choose Add transaction.
- Account, required. Pick it first; some of the form depends on it. The account cannot be changed after the transaction is created, so if you pick the wrong one you will need to delete the transaction and add it again.
- Copy from last transaction pre-fills the form from the most recent transaction in that account. Useful for a repeating payment. If the account has none yet, Finthy tells you so.
- Description, required, for example “Grocery shopping”.
- Amount, required. Enter it as a positive number and choose the direction below; zero is rejected, and so is a negative number.
- Transaction Type, required: Expense/Withdrawal or Income/Deposit. This, not the sign of the amount, is what decides the direction.
- Transaction Date, required.
- Category (Optional). Leaving it empty is allowed; the transaction then shows as uncategorised in reports, and you can set it later.
- Reference (Optional), free text for something like “Invoice #123”.
- Notes, free text. If you write any, it must be at least 3 and at most 500 characters.
Save with Add Transaction, or with Save & Add Another to keep the form open for the next one, which is much faster when you are entering a stack of receipts.
The Update account balance toggle
On a manual account the form shows Update account balance, on by default, with the help text “Apply this transaction to the account’s running balance”.
- On: the amount is added to the balance for income, subtracted for an expense. The form shows Current balance and the resulting New balance, so you can see the effect before saving.
- Off: the transaction is recorded without moving the balance. Use this when the balance already accounts for it, or when the transaction is there for the record only. You can also set the balance directly with Account Balance After Transaction (Optional).
Synced accounts do not show this toggle. Their balance comes from the bank, so adding, editing or deleting a transaction in Finthy never changes it.
Editing and deleting
Edit opens the same form as Edit Transaction, and on a manual account the toggle reads “Apply the new amount to the account’s running balance”. So correcting an amount can correct the balance in the same step, or leave it alone.
Delete asks for confirmation and warns that it cannot be undone. On a manual account it offers Update account balance once more, this time to “reverse this transaction’s effect on the account’s running balance”. Leave it on and deleting a 50 expense puts 50 back.
Rules the form enforces
| Rule | What you see |
|---|---|
| Description empty | “Description is required” |
| No account chosen | “Please select an account” |
| No date | “Transaction date is required” |
| Amount is zero | “Amount cannot be zero” |
| Amount negative | “Amount must be a positive number” |
| Notes under 3 characters | “Notes must be at least 3 characters” |
| Notes over 500 characters | “Notes cannot exceed 500 characters” |
Good to know
- A manual transaction behaves like any other. It counts in budgets, reports, the calendar, exports and Finthy AI.
- Reference and Notes are not exported. The transaction export has fourteen columns and neither is among them, so do not rely on an export to carry what you wrote there.
- Entering the same payment twice is easy to do when you are also importing statements. If it happens, mark one as a duplicate rather than deleting it: it then stays in your history but out of every total.