“My split transactions came in as a single line”
A shopping trip you had carefully divided across three categories arrives as one line for the full amount. Nothing was lost in transit: the bank never sent the split, because the formats banks export simply have no way to express one.
Symptoms
A transaction you previously split reimports as a single amount Category detail present in your register disappears for reimported entries The total is right but the breakdown is gone
What actually causes it
Bank formats do not carry splits
OFX, QFX and bank CSV describe what the bank knows: one payment of one amount to one merchant. How you divide that between groceries and household is your bookkeeping, invented in your software and never sent to the bank, so an export cannot return it.
The import overwrote an existing split
Re-importing a period you already categorised can replace your edited entries with the bank's flat version, taking the splits with it. This is why the detail seems to disappear rather than never arrive.
Memorised rules were not applied
Some apps can re-split a recognised payee automatically, but only when a memorised rule exists and matches the payee string in the file — and bank payee strings change often enough to miss.
How to fix it
- Check the file itself in the fixer below: it shows exactly what each transaction contains, which confirms the split was never in the data.
- Restore from a backup if the import overwrote splits you had already entered — that is far faster than rebuilding them.
- Set up memorised or renaming rules for the payees you split regularly, so future imports get divided automatically.
- Import only date ranges you have not categorised yet; overlapping an already-worked period is what puts the earlier work at risk.
Related import problems
Skip the manual edit — fix it automatically
The fixer shows the exact fields the bank sent, which is the quickest way to see that the split detail was never part of the file. Free, no signup, no upload.
Open the fixer