Money moves, it never vanishes

Concepts

Every transaction in Balanced moves money from one account to another. Once that clicks, salaries, purchases, transfers and credit cards all work the same way.

Think of your accounts as places money can be. Your checking account and your wallet are places, but so are Salary, where your pay comes from, and Groceries, where your food money goes. A transaction records money moving from one of these places to another.

What leaves one account arrives in another

Every transaction has at least two lines: the account the money leaves, with a minus, and the account it arrives in, with a plus. Together they add up to zero. Money never appears out of nowhere, and it never simply disappears.

Your salary arrives

On payday, €2,500 arrives in Checking. It comes from Salary.

Salary · Oct 1

Assets:Checking

+2,500.00

Income:Salary

−2,500.00

Balanced

0.00 ✓

You buy groceries

A few days later, €42.80 leaves Checking and arrives in Groceries. Groceries collects what you spend on food, so its plus grows with every purchase.

Supermarket · Oct 5

Expenses:Groceries

+42.80

Assets:Checking

−42.80

Balanced

0.00 ✓

Checking now holds €2,457.20, Salary shows −2,500.00 and Groceries +42.80. Add all three together and you get zero.

Why income has a minus

The minus on Salary looks odd at first, but it isn’t a loss. Income is where money comes from, so money leaves it. Over a year, Salary collects a large minus: everything you’ve earned. Your expense accounts collect a plus: everything you’ve spent.

You rarely have to think about this. The monthly summaries in your transaction lists and the charts show income as a positive amount.

Balanced does the math

When you record a transaction, you type the amounts you know and leave one empty. Balanced fills it in so the transaction adds up to zero, and you can only save once it does.

A transaction can also have more than two lines. One receipt from the supermarket might cover food and household things: two expense accounts, paid from one checking account. Try it:

Try it · Balance the transaction

Supermarket: groceries and a few household things

Expenses:GroceriesExpenses:HouseholdAssets:Checkingcalculated

Leave an amount empty and Balanced calculates it for you.

Balanced — ready to save ✓

Change an amount, or clear one so Balanced calculates it. As long as one line is empty, the transaction always balances.

Why this helps

• Nothing gets lost. Every euro is always in exactly one account, so your balances add up.
• Nothing special to learn. Moving money to savings, paying with a credit card, paying the card off or taking out a loan are all moves between two accounts. Credit cards and debt shows how.
• You see both sides. Every transaction tells you where the money came from and where it went.

Under the hood · for the curious

This way of keeping books is called double-entry accounting. Merchants in Italy used it in the 1400s, and Luca Pacioli described it in a book in 1494. It’s still the method accountants use today.

Plain-text accounting tools write the same two transactions like this. Each indented line is a posting: one account and one amount.

2026-10-01 Salary
  Assets:Checking      2500.00 EUR
  Income:Salary       -2500.00 EUR

2026-10-05 Supermarket
  Expenses:Groceries     42.80 EUR
  Assets:Checking       -42.80 EUR

The rule is the same for every transaction: its postings sum to zero. Accountants call the plus side debit and the minus side credit. Balanced doesn’t use those words, only plus and minus.

Next: The five account types explains which accounts you need and how to read their balances.