I upgraded to paid recently and am having a super hard time understanding how to account for my credit card payments. Here’s how I currently have things set up:
- I have several envelopes for various expenses (e.g., “House expenses”, monthly; “Weekly expenses”; weekly; “Medical expenses”; monthly)
- I have corresponding accounts at my bank for each envelope, which are filled via account transfer from my Checking and are all synced to Goodbudget. So every month on the first, there is a bank transaction that moves money from the Checking account to the House account, the Medical account, etc., which shows up in Goodbudget via the Bank Sync.
- I have fills set monthly corresponding to the scheduled transfers as required by Goodbudget
- I pay for all purchases on my single credit card (Visa)
- Each month, I pay the credit card off by paying the expenses on the Visa in each envelope from their corresponding account. So Medical expenses, in the Medical envelope, get paid from the Medical account, which has money in it from the transfer from checking at the beginning of the month etc.. This generates both a payment to the Visa (shows up in Goodbudget in green) and a debit from the account (in black).
Where I’m lost is that there are two transactions for each credit card payment: the credit to the Visa in green and the debit from the account in black. Both are showing up as needing some kind of extra approval I don’t understand and none of my balances reflect reality after two months of this. I read another comment that suggests I’m supposed to delete one of these to keep things straight
, and change one to a transfer, but I don’t know which one is which or why that would be? And why would I delete an autoimported transaction that really did happen in my bank?
I’m so very confused by this. I really really want to have my bank transactions auto-imported–entering all things manually isn’t an option–but I don’t understand at all how to make my basic payment structure show up correctly in Goodbudget. Entering a fake payment or transfer for each transaction on the Visa is also not an option for me. Can anyone advise how to make credit card payments work? The documentation isn’t helping me. I do pay the account balance in full monthly, if that helps.