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Activity
Your Activity page is the receipts of your financial life. Every dollar that moves — in, out, or sideways between your own accounts — gets an entry here.
vondo uses these entries to drive everything else: account balances, category spending, the budget, the reports. Get them right and the rest takes care of itself.
You can manage activity from the Activity page or directly from any account’s detail view. Both work the same way.
The four transaction types
Picking the right type matters. Here’s the cheat sheet:
| Type | Effect on account | Effect on budget |
|---|---|---|
| Income | Adds money to the account | Increases Ready to Assign |
| Expense | Removes money from the account | Increases Spent in the chosen category |
| Transfer | Moves money between two of your accounts | No effect — money stays inside your net worth |
| Credit (refund) | Adds money back to the account | Reduces Spent in the chosen category. Does not add to Ready to Assign. |
Why Credit and Income are different: A refund cancels a previous expense. Your category should reflect the net cost (the $80 grocery bill minus the $20 you returned), not “$80 spent + $20 of new income to budget.” Credit gets this right. Use Income for actual new money: paychecks, gifts, interest earned.
Quick examples
| You did this | Use this type |
|---|---|
| Got paid by your employer | Income |
| Bought groceries | Expense |
| Returned a $30 shirt | Credit (against your Clothing category) |
| Paid off your credit card from checking | Transfer |
| Got a $50 birthday check from grandma | Income |
| Got a refund for a canceled flight | Credit (against your Travel category) |
Create a transaction
- Open Activity and click New Transaction (or hit the same button on an account’s detail page).
- Fill in:
- Type — Income, Expense, Transfer, or Credit
- Account — which account this affects. The dropdown shows each account’s current balance next to its name, so you can tell at a glance which one has the funds.
- Amount — always positive; the type tells vondo the direction. You can type math expressions here:
30+12.50,100/4,(15+8)*2— vondo evaluates them when you tab away. Useful for splitting a check or applying a percentage on the fly. - Date — defaults to today
- Category — required for Expense and Credit. The dropdown shows each category’s Available balance next to its name, so you can pick one that has room without leaving the form. Credit-card payment categories are intentionally hidden from this picker — they’re filled automatically by the CC auto-flow, not picked as a spending destination.
- Payee — optional, but useful for spending analysis
- Memo — optional notes
- Cleared — toggle if it’s already cleared your bank statement
- Click Save to close the dialog, or Save and New to keep it open and start the next entry. The form keeps your account, type, and date so you can rip through several entries quickly; the amount field gets the focus.
Transfers
For a Transfer, vondo asks for both the from account and the to account. It creates a linked pair of transactions — one debit, one credit — that always move together. Edit one, the other updates. Delete one, the other goes too.
For example: You move $500 from Checking to Savings. vondo records:
- Checking: -$500 (Transfer to Savings)
- Savings: +$500 (Transfer from Checking)
Both transactions share an internal pairing. Your net worth doesn’t change; your Checking balance dropped, your Savings balance grew.
Splits
A split lets you divide one transaction across multiple categories. This is the move for grocery store runs that include both food and household items, or any other purchase that doesn’t fit cleanly in one bucket.
To split:
- In the create or edit dialog, toggle Split.
- Add a row for each category, each with:
- Category
- Amount
- Memo (optional)
- The total of the splits has to match the transaction’s total.
Worked example: Target run, $87.43 total. Of that, $54 was groceries and $33.43 was household stuff (cleaning supplies, light bulb, that thing for the cat). One transaction, two splits, two categories. vondo shows the right amount in each category’s spending.
You can have as many splits as you need. Remove a split by deleting its row — if only one remains, vondo converts the transaction back to a normal (non-split) transaction.
Debt payments
Debt payments are a specialized transaction type for paying down a loan account. They give you a clean breakdown of the three things a loan payment usually includes:
| Component | Where it goes |
|---|---|
| Principal | Reduces the loan account’s balance |
| Interest | Posts as an expense in the linked payment category |
| Fees | Posts as an expense in the linked payment category |
To record a debt payment:
- Open New Transaction and switch to Debt Payment mode.
- Pick the source account (where the money comes from — usually checking).
- Pick the loan account being paid down.
- Enter the principal, interest, and fees amounts.
- Confirm the payment category (defaults to the one linked to the loan).
- Save.
Your checking balance drops by the total payment, the loan balance drops by the principal, and interest plus fees show up as spending in the payment category. No mental math required.
Worked example: Your $1,247 mortgage payment is $983 principal + $251 interest + $13 fees. You record the payment as Debt Payment:
- Checking: -$1,247
- Mortgage loan balance: -$983
- Mortgage Interest category Spent: +$264 (interest + fees)
Next month the principal goes up a bit and the interest goes down. vondo captures this faithfully without you having to redo the math.
For payments that happen on a schedule, see Recurring debt payments.
Cleared status
Each transaction has a cleared flag. It’s a simple way to mark transactions that have been confirmed by your bank — useful when you’re matching your records against a statement.
Two common workflows:
- Reconcile against a statement once a month, marking each line cleared as you go. (vondo’s Reconciliation flow does this automatically — recommended.)
- Leave recently entered transactions uncleared until they post on your bank’s side.
The cleared flag is informational only — it doesn’t change balance calculations.
Edit and delete transactions
Click any transaction in the list to open its edit dialog. You can change any field, including converting a regular transaction into a split or back. Click Save to apply.
To remove a transaction, open the edit dialog and click Delete. The affected account’s balance updates immediately. Deleted the wrong one? Hit ⌘Z (Mac) / Ctrl+Z (Windows / Linux) to bring it back — see Getting Started → Undo.
Heads up: Opening balance transactions are special. They’re auto-created with each account and don’t affect budgets. You can edit the amount if you mistyped your starting balance, but you can’t delete the opening balance entry without deleting the account itself.
Search and filters
The top of the Activity page has two ways to narrow the list:
Search box
Type in the Search activity… box to substring-search across:
- the transaction’s memo
- its payee name
- its category name
- the category names of any split rows on that transaction
The match is case-insensitive and partial — typing whole finds “Whole Foods”, and typing house will surface a split-transaction even if its top-level category isn’t “Household”.
Useful when you remember the name of the place or what you noted but not the date or amount.
Power-user tokens
The search box also recognizes a small token syntax. When a token matches a known account / category / payee / type, it gets promoted into a structured filter and the rest of the box stays as free text.
| Token | Effect |
|---|---|
category:Food |
Filter by category. Use category:"Eating Out" for multi-word names. |
payee:Amazon |
Filter by payee. Quote multi-word names. |
account:Checking |
Filter by account. Quote multi-word names. |
type:expense (or type:income, type:transfer, type:credit) |
Filter by transaction type. |
>100, >=100 |
Minimum absolute amount. |
<500, <=500 |
Maximum absolute amount. |
since:2026-05-01 |
Start date (ISO YYYY-MM-DD). |
until:2026-05-31 |
End date (ISO YYYY-MM-DD). |
If a name lookup misses (you typed category:Foo and have no category called “Foo”), the token stays in the search text instead of silently doing nothing — that way you can see the spelling didn’t take.
Combine freely: payee:Amazon >50 since:2026-01-01 office finds purchases at Amazon over $50 since January 1 with “office” anywhere in the memo.
Filter pills
Below the search box, every filter is a togglable pill. Tap one to set it; tap the × to clear it.
| Filter | What it does |
|---|---|
| Account | Show transactions for one specific account |
| Category | Show transactions in a specific category |
| Payee | Show transactions with a specific payee |
| Type | Restrict to Income, Expense, Transfer, or Credit |
| Date range | Pick a start and end date |
| Amount | Set a minimum, a maximum, or both. Either bound is optional. Compares absolute values, so Min 50 matches a $50 expense and a $50 income equally. |
Filters combine with AND logic — every active pill applies. The search box also stacks on top: a search term plus a Type pill returns only matches that satisfy both.
For example: Want to see everything you spent at “Whole Foods” this year? Type “Whole Foods” in the search box, set the Type pill to Expense, set Date range to January 1 → today. There’s your number.
Saved views
Once you’ve built a filter combination you like — say, “Expenses over $100 in the Travel category since January” — you can save it for one-click reuse. The Views button sits to the right of the search input.
Save a view
- Set up the filters (and search text) you want.
- Click Views → Save current as….
- Give it a name and save.
Load a view
- Click Views.
- Pick the view from the list. The current filter set is replaced wholesale — a view is meant to be a clean snapshot, not a partial overlay.
Delete a view
Hover over a view in the popover and click the × that appears. Cheap to recreate, so no confirmation modal — just confirm in the toast.
You can have up to 25 saved views per account. If you hit the limit, delete one to make room for a new one.
Worked example: Create three views — “Uncategorized this month”, “Spending > $100 last 90 days”, and “Restaurants this year”. Now your three most common questions about your money are each one click away.
Sorting
Click any column header in the Activity table to sort by that column. Click the same header again to flip ascending / descending. An arrow indicator on the header shows which column is the active sort and in which direction.
| Column | Sort behavior |
|---|---|
| Date | Default sort — newest first. Click to reverse to oldest first. |
| Payee / Memo | Alphabetical by payee name; rows without a payee sort by memo. |
| Category | Alphabetical by category name. |
| Amount | Sorts by absolute value, so $1,200 and -$1,200 sit together. |
| Account | Alphabetical by account name. |
The current sort is reflected in the URL, so a sorted view can be bookmarked or shared. Combine with filters and search freely — sort applies after every other filter has been resolved.
Pagination
Long transaction lists load in pages of 50. As you scroll near the bottom, vondo fetches the next batch automatically. There’s no “next page” button — just keep scrolling.
For very large queries, set a date range filter rather than scrolling through everything.
Recurring transaction links
Transactions created from a recurring rule keep a reference to the rule that produced them. So you can trace any transaction back to its template, and vondo can keep your recurring schedule accurate.
Edits to a transaction created by a recurring rule don’t change the rule itself — only that one occurrence. (Want to change the rule? Edit it directly on the Recurring page.)
Bulk import
Got a CSV from your bank? Don’t type a year of transactions by hand.
The Import & Export page covers vondo’s three-step CSV import wizard, including how to map columns from any bank’s export format and how to avoid duplicates against transactions you’ve already entered.
Account detail view
Every account has a detail page that shows the same transaction list, scoped to just that account. Use it to:
- Reconcile against a paper or online statement (or click Reconcile for the guided flow)
- Quickly add a bunch of transactions for one account
- Review activity over a specific period without setting account filters
It’s the same Transactions page you already know — just narrower.