How to review imported transactions

The highest-value thing you can do in a review pass is to identify movements between your own accounts. A payment from checking to a credit card, or a move into savings, is neither spending nor income. Left misclassified, each one inflates both your income and your expense totals, and every ratio built on them.

This matters most in exactly the case that is most common: paying a card you also have connected. The purchases on the card are the expense. The payment is the transfer.

Duplicates usually appear for a structural reason rather than at random: the same account connected twice through two institutions, or a period of history that was also entered by hand before the account was connected.

Countorra matches on the institution's own identifier for a transaction, so re-running a sync does not create second copies of anything it has already seen. The duplicates worth hunting are the ones that came from two different sources describing the same event.

Categorization is worth doing after the ledger is structurally correct, because recategorizing a duplicate is wasted effort. Keep the set of categories small enough that the choice is obvious; ambiguity between two similar categories costs more than it ever returns.

The assistant can categorize a transaction for you, but anything that changes a record waits for you to approve it. That is a fixed rule in Countorra, not a setting — a proposal is shown, and nothing is written until you confirm it.