How to record every kind of transaction in LastWallet

The three record types you'll ever need

Every entry you add starts with picking one of three tabs on the Add Record screen. Almost everything in this guide is just a matter of choosing the right one and filling in a few fields underneath it:

• Expense — money leaving one of your accounts, spent on something.
• Income — money arriving in one of your accounts, earned or received.
• Transfer — money moving between two of your own accounts. No spending or earning happens; your net worth doesn't change.

Underneath whichever tab you pick, the same handful of fields do most of the work: Category (what kind of expense/income this is — not shown for transfers), Labels (free-form tags for cutting across categories, e.g. 'weekly-shop' or 'Ali'), Payer (a free-text note on who was involved), Payment type (cash, card, bank transfer, etc.), Date & time, and Note. Keep these in mind — the scenarios below are really just different combinations of the same fields.

Everyday expenses and income

This is the bulk of daily use. Groceries, fuel, dining out, utility bills, subscriptions, rent — all of it is an Expense record: pick the account you paid from, a category (e.g. 'Groceries', 'Utilities'), the amount, and you're done. Add a Label if you want to slice it further later — e.g. tagging every entry from a specific trip or a shared household budget.

Salary, freelance payments, interest, dividends, rental income, cashback and refunds all work the same way on the Income tab: pick the account the money landed in, a category (e.g. 'Salary', 'Refund'), and the amount. That's the whole flow — no separate 'refund' or 'reimbursement' record type is needed, Income covers all of it.

Moving money between your own accounts

Anything that isn't spending or earning — it's just money changing location — belongs on the Transfer tab. Once you pick Transfer, a second account field ('To account') appears, and Category becomes optional since nothing was spent or earned.

• Moving cash to your bank, or bank to savings — Transfer, From = Cash/Bank, To = the destination account.
• Paying a credit card bill — Transfer, From = your bank account, To = your card account. This reduces the card's balance (a liability) rather than logging an expense — the actual spending was already recorded when you made each card purchase.
• Topping up an e-wallet — Transfer, From = Bank, To = the e-wallet account.
• Exchanging currency between two of your own accounts — Transfer between an account in one currency and an account in another; LastWallet keeps each account's balance in its own currency.

Lending and borrowing with friends and family

There's no dedicated 'loan to a friend' record type — and that's deliberate. Money you lend out hasn't been spent (you'll get it back), so it shouldn't reduce your net worth or show up as an expense. The right model is a Transfer into an account that represents what's owed to you, exactly the same shape as moving money to your own savings.

• Lending money out — create (or reuse) an asset-type account for the receivable, then Transfer from your cash/bank account into it. Your cash goes down, the receivable goes up — your net worth is unchanged, because you still own the money, just in a different form.
• Getting repaid — Transfer the other way, from the receivable account back into cash/bank.
• Borrowing money — Transfer from a liability-type 'payable' account into your cash/bank account. Repaying it is a Transfer back out.

Loans and EMIs

A formal loan you take out works the same way as borrowing from a person: Transfer from a loan-type liability account into the account the money landed in. The loan account's balance represents what you still owe.

Repayments (EMIs) are usually two things bundled into one bank debit: paying down what you owe, and interest charged on top. Recording them as two separate entries keeps your reports honest — a Transfer for the principal portion (from your bank account to the loan account, reducing the liability) and an Expense for the interest portion (category 'Interest' or similar, since that part really was a cost to you, not money you're getting back). Credit card purchases follow the same logic as any other Expense at the time of purchase; it's only the bill payment itself that's a Transfer, as covered above.

Recurring bills and reimbursable spend

For anything that repeats — rent, subscriptions, EMI installments, a recurring salary — save yourself the retyping with templates. Fill in a record once, tick 'Create template from this record', and next time you're adding a similar entry, pick it from the Template dropdown at the top of the Add Record screen to prefill everything, then just adjust the date or amount if needed.

Reimbursable spend — paying for something on a friend's or your employer's behalf, expecting the money back — follows the same pattern as lending: it's not really an expense, it's a temporary receivable. Use either a dedicated or shared receivable account as described above, and record the eventual reimbursement as a Transfer back in, not as Income.

Quick reference

Once your accounts, categories and a few templates are set up, almost every day-to-day entry reduces to a 10-second Expense or Income record — the Transfer cases above are the ones worth remembering, since they're the difference between LastWallet quietly tracking what you actually own versus your reports drifting out of sync with reality.