How Transactions Work

Where transactions come from and what the fields mean.

How transactions work

A transaction is a single debit or credit on one of your accounts. Satsuma does not connect to your bank, so every transaction arrives via CSV import, email forwarding, or email scanning.

Transaction sources

Each transaction has a source that shows where it came from:

Source	How it arrived
csv	Uploaded via CSV import
email	Forwarded to the `txns@` address
gmail	Picked up by the Gmail scanner
outlook	Picked up by the Outlook scanner
imap	Picked up by the IMAP/POP3 scanner

Debit vs credit

Debit — money going out (purchases, fees)
Credit — money coming in (salary, refunds, transfers in)

The dashboard "Income" figure only counts credits on accounts that are not credit cards or debit cards. Credits on a credit card are payments or refunds, not income.

Duplicate prevention

Every transaction has a deduplication fingerprint built from: account, date, amount, description, and transaction type. Re-importing the same CSV or receiving the same bank alert twice will not create a duplicate.

Fields you can edit

After import you can:

Change the category — manually overrides auto-categorization
Add notes — freeform text for your own reference
Link a receipt — match it to an existing receipt
Split the amount — allocate across multiple categories when no receipt is attached

You cannot edit the amount, date, or description directly — those come from the source data.