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When you move money between two of your own accounts, withdraw cash from an ATM, or pay back a friend, your net worth does not change: the money is still yours, it just moved. That is why guito treats these movements as transfers and does not count them as income or expense. This page explains how we recognize a transfer and why these movements stay out of your totals.
You don’t need to know any of this to use guito. This is for anyone who wants to understand why some movements don’t enter the income and expense sums. For the steps to link a transfer or exclude a movement from cash flow, see Transactions.

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What a transfer is

A transfer is a movement where the other side is you: another of your own accounts (whether or not it is in guito), your own cash wallet, one of your own investments, or one of your own credits. The rail used (SEPA transfer, MB WAY, instant transfer, ATM) does not matter. What matters is whose money is on the other side. Counting these as an expense would inflate your spending when it was really just money moving between accounts. That is why guito puts them in a neutral category, Transfers: they stay visible in your list, but they are left out of your income and expense totals.
Payments to named companies (entities with legal suffixes like UNIPESSOAL, LDA, SA, LTD) are never treated as transfers. They are real expenses.

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What guito classifies as a transfer

  • Person-to-person payments (MB WAY, Revolut Pay) to and from individuals: these could be a reimbursement, a gift, or a loan repayment, so they stay neutral.
  • ATM withdrawals: the money is still in your wallet, it just changed form.
  • Deposits and withdrawals from your brokerage: this is cash moving in and out of your investment wallet, not an investment itself.
Transfers with a clear commercial purpose in the description (for example “RENT PAYMENT”, “INVOICE”) are not treated as transfers. They keep the appropriate expense category.

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How we recognize a pair

When both legs of a transfer are in guito, the system tries to link them into a pair. After each sync, guito looks for two of your movements, in different accounts, with the same amount and opposing signs, within a short window of days that covers SEPA delays and weekends. Finding a value mirror is not enough. Each candidate pair is then validated, comparing descriptions, names, and patterns, to confirm it really is the same movement. This check prevents mistakenly linking two same-amount transfers between different people. Confirmed pairs are linked, and both legs are excluded from your income and expense totals. When the system recognizes a value mirror but the sign is not enough to decide on its own, a suggestion appears on your Overview that you can confirm with one click. And when a classification does not match what you expected, recategorizing the movement teaches guito to apply your preference to similar cases in the future.

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Edge cases

Without the other leg in guito, pair detection is not possible. Even so, the movement stays neutral through its category. If you want to link the pairs, you can add the other account as a manual account in guito.
These are classified as a transfer by default, because the wallet is an account of yours that is not being tracked. If you want to track physical cash, you can add a manual wallet account and link the pairs.
When you buy or sell an instrument, money moves between your cash account and the investment. In the transactions list, guito shows this flow from origin to destination, just as it does for internal transfers, because it is a reallocation between two balances you own. Dividends are not included here: they are income from the company, not a transfer between your own accounts, so they keep their normal income display.

Transactions

Link a transfer, exclude a movement from cash flow, and adjust categories.

Cash flow

How guito computes income and expenses, and what stays out of the totals.