Transfers

A transfer is money moving between two of your own accounts — not income, not an expense. Getting transfers right keeps them from inflating your spending, and Doric is built to make that easy: in most cases you just mark the transaction and Doric records both sides for you.

What counts as a transfer

Any time money leaves one of your accounts and lands in another, that's a transfer:

Moving money from checking to savings (or back).
Depositing or withdrawing cash.
Paying a credit-card bill from your bank account.

Credit-card payments are transfers, not expenses. The spending already happened on each purchase you made with the card — those are your expenses. Paying the bill just moves money from checking to the card; counting it as an expense too would double-count it. So mark card payments as transfers, and your reports stay honest.

Marking a transfer

In the register, open the transaction's Category picker and choose ⇄ Transfer to another account…, then pick the account the money went to (or came from). That's it — Doric records the movement on both accounts from this single transaction: it comes out of the first account and into the other. There's no need to go find the second account and enter anything there.

Do I need to link it?

This is the one part worth understanding, and it comes down to a simple question: are you importing (or otherwise tracking) both accounts?

If you only track one side — you're done

Say you import your checking account but not your savings, or you pay a credit card you don't track in Doric. Just mark the transaction as a transfer, as above. Because Doric already recorded both halves of the movement, the other account's balance is correct and nothing is double-counted. There's nothing to link.

If you track both sides — link the two

If you import both accounts, the same movement shows up twice — once on each account's statement (money leaving checking, and the matching deposit arriving in savings). Left alone, that's two transactions for one real event. Linking joins them into a single transfer so it's only counted once.

To make this painless, the moment you mark a transaction as a transfer Doric opens a Link Transfer window and searches the destination account for a matching transaction — same amount, around the same date. If it finds the other half, click Link and you're done. If it doesn't find anything — or you don't track the other account — just close the window; your transfer is already complete.

Tip: the Link Transfer window looks within a few days by default. If the two sides cleared further apart, widen the day range at the top of the window and Doric searches again — helpful when a transfer takes a few days to post.

Linking two transactions yourself

You can also link transfers straight from the register without marking one first. Select the two transactions — the outgoing one on one account and the matching incoming one on the other — using their checkboxes. When exactly two transactions with matching amounts on different accounts are selected, a Link as Transfer button appears in the bulk action bar. Click it and Doric pairs them as the two halves of one transfer.

Editing or undoing a transfer

Click a transfer's row to open the Edit Transfer window, where you can adjust its description, source and destination accounts, and amount, then Save. To turn it back into ordinary transactions, use Remove Transfer there — or, if two linked transactions should be separated, open the Link Transfer window and click Unlink.

Why it matters

Because Doric knows these are transfers, it keeps them out of your income and expense totals — your Profit & Loss reflects real earning and spending, not money you shuffled between your own accounts. On the balance sheet, the movement simply shifts between the two accounts, as it should. To see all your transfers, set the register's Type filter to Xfer.