Why aren’t transfers shown as expenses in my budget?

Our goal at Origin is to help you track your actual spending as accurately as possible. That’s why transfers are treated differently from expenses in your budget and spending views.

Categorization System

Every transaction in Origin is assigned one of three primary types:

• Income
• Expense
• Transfer

Transfers vs. Expenses

A transfer is money moving between your own accounts — for example, moving money from checking to savings.

Transfers aren’t considered true expenses because you’re not spending the money — you’re simply moving it from one account to another.

If transfers were included as expenses, your spending and budget totals could appear inflated. Similarly, counting the incoming side of a transfer as income could make it look like you earned money that you already had.

How Origin Handles Transfers

Transfers are excluded from your spending, budget, and cash flow calculations to give you a more accurate view of your finances.

Origin can also automatically identify when money is being transferred between two of your connected accounts.

When Origin confidently identifies the incoming and outgoing transactions as two sides of the same transfer, both transactions are categorized as Transfer. For example, if you move $1,000 from checking to savings, Origin may match the $1,000 leaving your checking account with the $1,000 arriving in savings.

If Origin can’t confidently identify a matching transaction, it won’t automatically pair them.

Reviewing Matched Transfers

Automatically matched transfers will appear in Review Transactions so you can make sure the match looks right.

When viewing a matched transfer, you can also see the related transaction and navigate to the other side of the transfer.

If Origin incorrectly identifies a transaction as a transfer, you can Revert the match. Both transactions will return to the categories they had before Origin matched them.

Want to Include a Transfer in Your Budget?

If a transaction categorized as a transfer actually represents spending — for example, sending money to another account to pay rent — you can edit the transaction and change it to the appropriate expense category.

Once updated, the transaction will be included in your spending and budget calculations.

By keeping transfers separate from true income and expenses, Origin helps give you a more accurate picture of where your money is actually going.