“My credit card import looks completely wrong”
Credit card imports go wrong in a distinctive way: the numbers are right but everything means the opposite. A card is a liability rather than an asset, and software that has been told otherwise interprets every transaction backwards.
Symptoms
Purchases appear as income and payments as spending The balance is positive when you owe money The same file imports correctly into a different account
What actually causes it
The account was created with the wrong type
A card set up as a checking account inverts the meaning of every sign. The transactions are stored correctly; the account type decides how they are read, and no amount of editing individual entries fixes the underlying setup.
The export uses the bank's point of view
A charge increases what you owe the bank, so some exports write it positive. Your software expects your point of view, where the same charge is negative.
Payments and refunds are indistinguishable
A payment to the card and a refund from a merchant both appear as money in. Without transaction types they cannot be told apart, and mis-categorising them distorts spending reports even when the balance is right.
How to fix it
- Check the account type first — a card recorded as a bank account is the most common cause and the quickest to confirm.
- Drop the file into the fixer below to see the raw signs the bank sent, so you know whether the inversion is in the file or in the setup.
- Recreate the account with the correct type and re-import rather than editing entries; the next import would invert again.
- Categorise card payments as transfers from the paying account, which keeps them out of your spending totals.
Related import problems
Skip the manual edit — fix it automatically
Seeing the signs exactly as the bank wrote them settles whether the file or the account type is doing the inverting. Free, no signup, no upload.
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