How To Transfer Money Between Accounts
January 14, 2022
Your budget should reflect reality. So it is not only important to keep track of what each dollar is allocated for but also to know where each dollar is.
At some point in your budgeting journey it is going to come up that you need to transfer money between accounts in your budget.
- Transaction Form
- Transfer Money
- All Transaction View
- Posted Link Transactions
- Transfer Link Transaction
- Note
Transaction Form
When you first start your budget by default your payee list will only contain a list of your current accounts (If you have added any). These are automatically created for you whenever you add a new account. See our article on How To Pay Credit Cards to find out more about these.
In this article we will be focusing on transferring money between bank accounts.
Transfer Money
In this example we want to move $500 from our savings account to our checking account.
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Amount - We make the transaction amount a negative $500.
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Payee - We are essentially paying this money to our checking account because that is where we want the money to go, so we select First Bank from the Transfers list for the payee field.
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Category - We are not actually losing or gaining money, we are just moving it, so we do not need a category. You will see whenever you select one of your accounts as the payee that the category field will be disabled to indicate nothing is needed for this field.
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Account - This field works as it does for every transaction. Which account is the money coming from for a negative transaction, or which account is the money going to for a positive transaction.
All Transaction View
If we select the Account pane on the left side navigation then we can see all the transactions for the month. We can see that when we created a transaction to transfer money from one account to the other Ploutos Budget automatically created the matching transaction for the other account. If we delete either one of these transactions the sibling transaction will automatically be deleted.
Below we will go over the same process when bank accounts are linked with financial institutions.
Posted Link Transactions
If one or both of the accounts that we are transferring money to/from are linked for automatic imports then when the transfer gets posted by your bank the transactions will show up in the Link Transactions for that account.
Transfer Link Transaction
When a link transaction gets posted and shows up in Ploutos Budget it will give a helpful name in the payee field to signify what it is, but it will not know it is a transfer to an existing account in Ploutos Budget. You simply need to select the appropriate Transfers account option in your payee list.
In this case it is a positive amount. This means the money came to this account, so we will select Savings from the Transfers because it came from our savings account. The money came to our checking, so in the account field we will select First Bank.
This will work the same as manually adding a transfer transaction where the Category will be disabled and a sibling transaction will automatically be created.
Note
If both the accounts that we are transferring money between are linked then a linked transaction will show up for each account in the posted link transactions table. Since Ploutos Budget automatically creates the sibling transactions we only need to add one of the posted link transactions and can simply delete the other from the posted link transactions table.
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