“My Amex download imports incorrectly”
Amex exports are clean but written from the card issuer's point of view, and the account is a liability rather than an asset. Both facts push the same way: everything imports with the opposite meaning unless the account is set up correctly.
Symptoms
Charges appear as income and payments as spending The balance is positive when you owe money Supplementary card transactions are indistinguishable from yours
What actually causes it
Charges written positive
A charge increases what you owe, so the export may record it as a positive number. Software expecting your point of view — where a charge is money out — inverts every transaction on import.
The account type is wrong
A card recorded as a bank account rather than a credit card reverses the meaning of every sign, and no amount of editing individual entries corrects the underlying setup.
Multiple cards in one export
Supplementary cards appear in the same file with nothing but the description to distinguish them, so per-cardholder reporting is impossible without extra rules.
How to fix it
- Confirm the account is set up as a credit card before importing anything — this is the cause in most cases and the quickest to check.
- Drop the file into the fixer below to see the raw signs the issuer sent, which tells you whether the inversion is in the file or the setup.
- Categorise card payments as transfers from the paying account so they do not appear as spending.
- Use renaming rules if you need to separate supplementary cardholders, since the file itself does not.
Related import problems
Skip the manual edit — fix it automatically
Seeing the signs exactly as sent settles whether the file or the account type is doing the inverting — the two look identical in the register. Free, no signup, no upload.
Open the fixer