Transactions

The register

The register is one account’s list of transactions. You reach it by opening an account, and everything you do with a transaction — adding, editing, categorizing, clearing, reconciling — happens there.

Transactions arrive in three ways: you type them in, a connected bank imports them, or you post one from a scheduled bill. Whatever the source, they are the same kind of row afterwards.

The four statuses

Every transaction is in exactly one of four states. Three of them are yours; one comes from your bank.

Uncleared

The starting state for anything you enter yourself. It means: this has happened as far as you are concerned, but it has not settled at the bank yet.

Cleared

You have seen it on the bank’s side and marked it so. Moving a row between uncleared and cleared is a single click or tap on its status control.

Reconciled

Set by reconciling the account, never by hand. A reconciled row is locked: its status control no longer moves it, so a statement you have already footed cannot be quietly un-footed later.

Pending — and why it is not the same as uncleared

Pending means the row came from your bank connection. Your bank has authorized the payment but has not posted it yet — this morning’s card swipe, say. Only a connected bank can put a row into this state; anything you enter yourself is uncleared, never pending.

That distinction is worth holding on to, because the two look similar at a glance and mean different things. Uncleared is your statement about a transaction. Pending is your bank’s.

Pending rows are shown apart from the settled list so they cannot quietly move a figure you were reading, and their amounts are the bank’s provisional ones — a restaurant tip or a fuel hold can change before the payment posts.

How a pending transaction settles

When the bank posts the real transaction, Tovari updates the row that is already there. It does not delete it and insert a replacement, and it does not add a second row beside it.

That has consequences you can rely on:

• Your edits survive. A category, payee, or note you added while the row was pending is still there after it posts.
• You never get a duplicate. The pending row and the posted transaction are one row through the whole lifecycle, not two rows you have to tidy up.
• A payment you already entered is matched, not doubled. If you typed the payment in yourself and your bank later reports it, Tovari attaches the bank’s version to your row and keeps everything you wrote on it.
• Matching only ever happens inside one account. A row on one account is never matched to activity on another, so a similar-looking payment somewhere else in your household cannot be swallowed by mistake.

If the bank ends up not posting an authorized payment at all, the pending row does not linger forever — Tovari reconciles what it is holding against what the bank still reports outstanding.

Reconciling an account

Reconciling is how you agree an account with a statement. You enter the statement’s ending balance, mark rows cleared or uncleared until the difference reaches zero, and finish — and Tovari then locks the matched rows as reconciled.

Two things about it are worth knowing before you start.

Tovari re-checks the match itself before locking anything. The figure on your screen may be a few seconds old, and someone else in your household may have changed a transaction while you were working. So when you press finish, the match is verified again, and rows are locked only if it still holds. If it no longer holds, nothing is locked and you are asked to refresh and try again. That refusal is the protection working: it is what stops a stale screen from locking a period against numbers that have already moved.

Pending rows do not stand in your way. A transaction your bank has authorized but not posted is left out of the cleared total, exactly as an uncleared row is, so an outstanding pending payment can never be the reason a reconciliation will not balance.

Once an account is reconciled, reconciling again finds nothing new to lock — the rows from last time are already reconciled, and only rows you have cleared since will be picked up.

Transfers between your own accounts

Money moved between two of your own accounts is not spending. Tovari records such a movement as a pair of linked rows — one on each account — and leaves the pair out of your spending and income figures because they are linked, not because of the category they carry. Marking a transaction with a category named “Transfer” does not, on its own, exclude it from anything.

Figures Tovari works out for you

The register header shows the account’s Cleared, Uncleared, Working Balance, and — when the account has pending bank activity — a Pending figure. Each row also carries a running balance.

All of these are worked out by Tovari and sent to your screen; the app displays them rather than computing them, so every place you look agrees. Read them as meanings rather than as a sum to reproduce: adding the columns up by hand is not how they are defined.

Web

The layout

The register is a resizable grid with columns Status, Date, Payee, Notes, Category, Amount and Balance. Click the Date header to flip the sort, and drag a column edge to resize it — your widths are remembered.

Two sections sit apart from the settled list:

• Scheduled Bills — occurrences that have not been recorded yet, each with a way to enter it or skip it.
• Pending — not yet posted — the bank rows described above.

The action row

Above the grid: Add Transaction, Add Scheduled Item, File Import, Export, and Reconcile. Export produces a spreadsheet of the register as you are currently filtering it.

Adding a transaction

Add Transaction opens a dialog naming the account the row will land in, with fields for date, payee, amount, category and a note. Nothing is written until you click Add Transaction in the dialog; Cancel, Esc or a click outside closes it and writes nothing.

The Category field is also where you turn the new row into a transfer — pick a tracked account from the transfer group instead of a category, and Tovari creates the matching row in that account for you. It offers the account list once you have typed an amount, since a transfer needs a figure and a direction to work from.

Add Scheduled Item opens the same dialog dated tomorrow. What actually decides the outcome is the date, not the button: a date in the future is saved as a scheduled item that posts on that day and does not move your balance yet — the dialog says so, and its button reads Schedule Item. Pull the date back to today and it becomes an ordinary transaction again.

Finding transactions

The header carries a search box and a View panel holding the date range, an uncleared-only switch, an uncategorized-only switch and a bank-text switch. Searching and filtering are done by Tovari across the whole account, not just the rows already on screen, so a match further back is still found.

To drop a search and get the whole account back, click the ✕ at the right of the search box — it appears as soon as you have typed something — or press Esc while the box has focus.

Your View settings are remembered per account, so an account you always read a particular way opens that way next time. Search is deliberately not remembered — a search restored behind your back would silently hide rows.

Editing

Click a row to edit it in place; the same row is where you set the payee and the category. The circle in the Status column moves a row between uncleared and cleared, and on a reconciled row it shows a lock and does nothing.

Selecting several rows brings up a bar that can categorize them all at once, link them as a transfer to another account, or merge a matching pair into a single transaction.

On a phone browser

Opening the web app on a phone gives you the same register as a full-screen list: search, filters, the pending section, a transfer review section, and a tap-to-edit sheet, with swipe actions on a row.

Three things are not in this layout: reconciling, file import and export. All three need the room of the computer layout — use View Desktop Site in the More menu, or open Tovari on a computer.

Mobile

Getting there

The register is not its own tab. Open the Accounts tab and tap an account; the register opens inside that tab, so the tab bar stays put and the back gesture returns you to your accounts.

The layout

Instead of a grid, the register is a stack of labelled bands:

• The header band carries the account’s working figure with cleared and uncleared beneath it, and a line about pending activity when the account has any.
• Upcoming — scheduled occurrences not yet recorded.
• Pending at the bank — the pending rows, with the same “authorized but not posted” meaning described above.
• The settled transactions, grouped under date headers.

Rows are compact — payee, category and amount — and an uncategorized row is highlighted so it is easy to spot.

Filtering and the header controls

A filter control sits under the header, with chips showing what is currently applied so you can clear a filter with one tap. Bank transaction text — the bank’s own description under each row — is a switch inside that filter sheet.

The header itself carries every register action directly, with nothing behind a menu. Beside the back arrow and the notification bell sits Reconcile account; on the other side are help, Search, and Add a transaction. Scheduling is a choice inside the Add sheet rather than a separate command, and an account’s name, type and connection are edited from the Accounts screen — swipe a row on iOS, or press and hold on Android.

Editing

Tap the circle at the left of a row to move it between uncleared and cleared; its label states what the tap will do. A reconciled row shows a padlock and does not move.

Tap Add a transaction in the header to open the New transaction sheet — date, payee, category, amount and note. A Transaction / Scheduled switch at the top of that sheet decides which you are creating: leave it on Transaction for money that moves once, or choose Scheduled to step through how often it repeats, how much, and when it stops. You can change your mind either way without losing the sheet. Tapping an existing row opens the same sheet to edit it, without the switch — an existing transaction’s kind cannot change underneath you.

If you enter a payment your bank has already reported as pending, the app offers to settle the two together rather than leaving you with a duplicate.

Reconciling

Reconcile account, the scales button next to the notification bell, runs the same reconciliation as the web: enter the statement’s ending balance, work the difference to zero, and finish. Tovari re-checks the match before locking, exactly as described above, and confirms when the account is reconciled.

Related pages

• Accounts — the balances an account shows and what closing one does.
• Bank connections — where pending rows come from, and how much history a connection brings in.
• Payees — the payee list behind the Payee column, and the default category a payee can carry.
• Categories — where your categories came from, and how to rename or remove one.
• Bills — the register also surfaces recurring payments it has spotted in your bank activity but that have no schedule yet, so you can turn one into a bill from where you noticed it.
• Safe to Spend — what your register feeds.
• Reading your register — the short version, as part of the Quick start.
• Categorizing spending — putting each row in the right category.
• Where each feature works — the platform map for every documented feature.