“My payment app export does not import like a bank statement”
Payment apps record what happened inside their own system, and that is a different story from a bank statement. Money moving in from your card, sitting as a balance, and moving out to a friend can be three rows where a bank would have written one — and importing all three double-counts.
Symptoms
Each payment appears two or three times with different descriptions Transfers to your bank appear as spending rather than as transfers Fees are bundled into the transaction amount instead of listed separately
What actually causes it
Balance movements are recorded alongside payments
When a payment is funded directly from your card, the app records both the funding movement and the payment itself. Both are true from the app’s point of view, but importing both counts the same money twice in your ledger.
Transfers out have no matching transfer in
A withdrawal to your bank is a single row in the app export and a separate deposit row in your bank export. Imported independently, they become two unrelated transactions, and your net worth appears to change when nothing moved.
Fees and currency conversion are folded into one amount
Multi-currency payments often show a single converted figure that already includes the spread. Reconciling against the amount you expected to pay never matches, because the difference was never written as its own line.
How to fix it
- Decide whether the app is an account in your ledger or just a funding route — importing it both ways is what creates the duplicates.
- If you track it as an account, mark bank withdrawals as transfers between the two accounts rather than as income or spending.
- Run the export through the checker below to confirm the column structure before mapping, since these exports change layout more often than bank files do.
- Where the export offers a completed-transactions-only option, use it: pending balance movements are the rows most likely to be counted twice.
Related import problems
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