Debit & Credit User Guide

Transactions

Transaction Attributes

Every transaction in Debit & Credit has a set of common attributes, like amount, date, account and some others. However, there are four optional attributes that are important to be filled in if you want to have rich and comprehensive reports:

Description - something short and descriptive that differentiates this transaction from a number of similar ones. "Gift for John" or "New iPhone for Mary" would be good examples of descriptions.
Category - the most important attribute of any transaction that is later used for classification. Every category can have several subcategories, e.g. category "Bills" might have subcategories "Water" and "Internet".
Payee - short name of a person/company that is related to a transaction. Examples: Amazon, eBay, Apple Store.
Tag - a short name that allows you to further classify your transactions within an existing set of categories. Examples: "Trip to Japan", "Work Travel to Sydney". Please note that tags are disabled by default and require separate activation in the app settings. You can read more about tags here.

Please note that each of these attributes can be either created by typing it in or selected from the list of existing values.

Transaction Types

Expense - a transaction that results in a decrease in your net wealth. Examples: buying groceries, paying rent, interest paid by you.
Income - a transaction that results in an increase in your net wealth. Examples: salary, dividends, interest paid to you.
Transfer - a transaction that does not affect your net wealth in any way and represents a transfer between two accounts. Examples: bank transfer, paying credit card balance.

Example

John paid $1200 for the new Macbook. He created an expense in Debit & Credit for this transaction. The record has the amount of 1200, description "MacBook", category "Computers" and payee "Apple Store".

Related topics: creating transactions, editing transactions, refunding transactions, split categories.