Accounts are where the company's money actually is: the bank checking account, the savings, the credit card, the investment. Everything you record — a paid expense, received income — happens from an account. That's why having the company's accounts well registered is what makes the balances match reality.
Transfers are the complement: they move money from one of the company's accounts to another, without it being treated as an expense or income.
Registering an account
On the Accounts screen, click New account. The main fields are:
Name (required): how you identify the account. E.g. “Itaú — checking”, “Business card”.
Type (required): Checking, Savings, Credit card or Investment.
Current balance (required): how much is in the account today. It's the starting point of the calculations.
Initial balance (optional): the balance when you started tracking this account. If you leave it blank, the system uses the same current balance.
Institution, Branch (numbers only) and Account number: optional, useful to identify the account precisely.
Active: inactive accounts drop out of day-to-day selections but stay in the history.
If you're recording an expense, income or transfer and don't have an account yet, the “Create now” shortcut opens a quick registration without leaving the screen.
Note on the initial balance: it's the snapshot of the starting point. Once the account has movements, avoid changing it — doing so misaligns the history. To fix the day-to-day, record the entries; the current balance adjusts on its own.
The account statement
When you open an account, you see its statement: the list of movements grouped by day, with inflows in green and outflows in red. Use the period filter to focus on a specific range. It's the most direct way to check whether the account balance matches the bank's.
Transfers between accounts
When you move money from one of the company's accounts to another — for example, from checking to an investment — it is not an expense or income: it's a transfer. Recording it correctly avoids artificially inflating the business's numbers.
On the Transfers screen, provide:
Source account and Destination account: they must be different and active.
Amount: how much is being moved.
Date: the day of the transfer.
Description: a short identification of the reason.
On saving, the system subtracts from the source and adds to the destination automatically — both balances are updated at once. If one of the accounts is missing, the “Create now” shortcut is available here too.
Practical example: the company has $50,000 in checking and decides to invest $20,000. Create a transfer from “Checking” to the “Investment” account, amount $20,000. Right away, checking drops to $30,000 and investment goes up $20,000 — without any expense or income showing up in the company's result.
Tip
Register each of the company's real bank accounts separately and keep the balances up to date. The more faithful that picture is, the more reliable the cash flow and reports become — after all, they start from what's in the accounts.